Library clips

RustyBudget - multi-author blog task management tool…for blog post reviewing check out WriteWith and Approver. [via TC]

Snaplogger - a desktop app that takes interval based snapshots of your desktop or continuous video, kind of like continuous screencasting I guess.
Digital Inspiration has a great case use:
“SnapLogger can come in very handy when you are sharing your screen for tech support or a group meeting. Every action of the third-party is captured on the desktop and you know exactly what they did to fix your computer.”
This one came from giveaway of the day, such a cool idea for a blog.

I guess this is kind of in the attention space, like Thumbstrips, Cluztr, wakoopa, Slifeshare, Atten.TV, etc…Also see RobotReplay to see playback of your website visitors.

Jing - screencapture and screencasting desktop app (save as png or flash file, and upload to screencast.com (social network for screencasts) and share the URL in email, IM or blogs…what about widgets. Also see Screencast-o-Matic and Skitch. [via DI]

Techrigy SM2 - kind of what Quest (formerly Aftermail) did for email, monitor internal social media content for mentions of your company…web 2.0 big brother. [via SS]

Stixy - a collaborative notebook or clipping book, a bit like Google Notebook, but more pinboard than outliner, as you can share documents, clips, files, sticky notes, to-do…seems to be like Zude, even z-cubes . It’s really like a rich media whiteboard.

The other day on my friendstream post I covered lifestreams (aggregating all your profiles into one content stream), and most of these services are social networks allowing you to add friends, thus also having a friendstream…some of them even have an external friendstream feature (which is handy if your friends haven’t registered with your lifestream service).

Regarding external friendstreams, Spokeo (this is not a lifestream service) will fetch all your friends profiles from the services you use.
Whereas Tabber will allow you to create a lifestream for each of your friends from scratch…eeek, why do I have to do all the work.
This may be good in that you can add stuff from their networks that you may not belong to.

Haven’t tried Blueswarm, but it may auto-add a friendstream for you…a few others in my friendstream post are also mentioned, only they don’t stream the content.

I think entering your email contacts, and have the system look for these emails at various social networks will help identify and gather all your friends profiles and create a list and friendstream for you. Then you could manually enter missing stuff to just fill in the blanks.

Receive/Send messages and comments from one place

So that’s a friendstream, but what if you want to go further and be able to be notified and see messages and comments your friends have sent to any of your profiles, and in turn, what if you want to leave comments and messages on one of their profiles without having to go there.

ProfileLinker I believe has some of these features, and what about 8hands and minggl…can anyone fill me in on whether any of these services allow you to receive comments/messages from all your profiles in one spot, and send comments/messages from the one spot?

Come to think of it, to receive messages/comments, or at least a notification that you have a comment/message in one central place is the good old email account.
But this lacks in sending messages/comments to your friends various profiles from within your email.

See Fuser (below) for more on this.

I guess this is a bit similar to multi-IM clients like meebo that allow you to send and receive chat with various IM clients.

Also similar to this concept is GrandCentral, being the one place to keep up with phone communications.

What about even posting content to your own various profiles from the one place, lots of services I use allow you to post content by email.

Wow, from the one place you could:

- have a lifestream (as well as your own identity page)
- have a friendstream (as well as a contact/friend/buddy list…basically an identity page for each contact)
- save links from your friendstream back into any of your various social networks, like del.icio.us (or perhaps within this service)
- comment/message/share links (from your friendstream) to any of your friends social network profiles
- receive comment/messages from any of your profiles
- also be able to IM a contact (even group chat)
- add content to any of your social networks

Only thing missing is an RSS Reader, where you could then save links (as per above) and share links (as per above).

To go the extra mile you could have a section to subscribe to your friends OPML URL Reading List, but then you don’t have to, because the idea is that stuff they find in their Reading List will come to you anyway, if it’s relevant to you, this is the social filter (personalised/recommended content via your friends).

I imagine this service not to be a social network (too fatigued), but rather a personal management tool, where you could make a few pages public, like your lifestream, and friendstream.

This is coming close to the idea of attention streams and flows, leveraging on your tribe of friends, as well as a personal knowledge management central space. It also touches on Stowe Boyd’s Nerdvana concept, where your buddy list will have groups, and for each person: latest unread email, IM, blog post, appointment, read more for the whole centric concept.

Dinesh Tantri has some more thoughts where you don’t have to rely on being explicitly sent stuff from your friends network, or subscribe to your friends stuff to see the latest, but moreso automatically be notified if one of your friends performs an action that is relevant to you eg. blog post, comment, saved link, etc…

This concept would perhaps play on your Engagd APML file. You associate your APML file against the RSS feed of your friendstream, and any new stuff that your APML file agrees is relevant will be sent to you in any delivery format.
From here you can action this new stuff you have received by blogging it, emailing it, bookmarking it, IM a friend, sending a message or comment to a friend/s wall in any or many social networks, etc…

So what we have here is being able to:

1. follow your friends activities in one place
2. being able to send/receive stuff from them
3. being sent stuff automatically based on the matches from your APML file against your RSS friendstream.

Fuser

Anyway this post was meant to be about Fuser, what a tangent!

Fuser answers half of one of my criteria above: one place to receive all messages and comments from all your social networks and email accounts.

What I’m interested in is receiving messages/comments from all my social networks in the one space, but as mentioned earlier my email account does this anyway.
But it is a good idea to have all these types of communications in a separate service, away from usual email…hmmm, I could use a Gmail filter.

I haven’t tested Fuser as I don’t have a registration code, but this is what I expect to see from all my social networks:

- private messages, profile wall comments, comments on an item from my social network (eg. new comment on one of my YouTube posts)

I’m not just talking notifications, I want the actual content, the whole idea is not having to visit these sites.

Like the ShareThis concept, I’d like to be able to send a private message to a friend/s social network or leave a comment on a friend/s profile social network from the one spot…without this sending feature it’s only one way, my email client is already receiving alerts from my various social networks.

Not long ago I posted on the many aspects of attention, part of this was leveraging on your network of friends…I’ve posted about this with friendstream, group lifestreams, lifestreams, Link Sharing, Spokeo, FeedEachOther, Collaborative Recommendation…

This post is about the other aspect of attention, and that’s encapsulating your attention in a file so you can plug ‘n play at any website you visit and view personalised content…or subscribe to feeds and see only content based on your attention.

Back when I posted on attention Chris Saad from particls noticed my post, and we had an IM chat about his new development in the attention arena that is going to brings it all full circle.

Six weeks later he has a new release called Engagd.

In essence what you do is give Engagd food, like RSS feeds, websites, text…
eg. give it your lifestream feed - plenty here - (this may include your blog feed, bookmarks feed, presence feed, various social network feeds, etc…), you could also give it your clickstream (surfstream) feed (try a service like Clutzr, slifeshare).

What engagd will do is use its Profiler tool to convert this content into an APML attention file, and allow you to scan it against new content you come across, so you will see filtered or ranked content only, helps with information overload.

But the real deal is when you can visit sites with lots of content like Amazon, and just plug in your file.

This is taking personalisation mobile, basically a portable personalised web experience.

Your APML file is created using the Profiler, it’s considered to be stuff you like and are interested in…the clickstream is a bit tricky, because you are not really rating pages you surf to, it just knows you visited a page (more on this in a minute).

Anyway, then this APML file is fed into Item.Rank…how it works:

You give Item.Rank any RSS feed and it will assign a rank to each item in the feed, representing how personally relevent the item is to you based on scanning your APML file.
This is like creating your own particls really, put in a feed and it will rank and deliver items according to your attention.

Next time you subscribe to a feed or read a feed (it passes through Profiler) and it will be filtered by your past attention.

NOTE: The Item.Rank doesn’t just accept feeds, you can assign it any content, like a library of data.

So what does this mean for platforms?

It’s not just about users feeding their APML file (by entering their lifestream and clickstream feed), you could give a service like Amazon permission to send Profiler your visit stats after you leave the website, this way every site we visit helps us build our attention. Then Profiler can inturn send Amazon back the updated APML file for each user on demand.

This makes it more enhanced; before this, as a user we could record sites we visit (clickstream), but not what we do there (now these sites can give us a copy of our visit data).

The second feature is, sites like Amazon, can give ItemRank a collection of content, so when a user visits they can plug in their APML file and get personalised content.

This is truly a new step in the attention game, that actually makes it complete and purposeful…up till now we could create attention files, but we couldn’t do much with them besides filter/rank feed content from any site that provides a feed.

Now we have the ultimate use, to visit any site and plug ‘n play.

Further to this, the site can send us our attention stats of our visit, so next time we visit we will have an even more personalised experience.

Engagd is the technology that any website can use to help the user web experience be more personalised, this is going to slingshot the attention game, as websites can just add a module to make it work, they don’t have to develop attention modules inhouse, they may not even know what attention is, but just like feeds, it’s easy to RSSify your site, now it will be easy for platforms/websites to engagdify their sites.

Recap

1. Give Profiler your Attention Data - in the form of RSS feeds or Web pages - and it will generate an APML file you.

2. Give ItemRank your APML file and a set of content, and it will return that content filtered and ranked by Personal Relevancy.

3. At the moment, the set of content you give ItemRank could be an RSS feed, but, as a user, how do you give it a library of information, how do you get into the backend of a library of data (like a book collection) this is when platforms, like Amazon or any library catalogue, can incorporate it for us, so when we visit we just plug in our APML file.

4. Sites will also send our attention file stats from our visit to Profiler, and our APML file will keep the service updated of our current attention.

Use Case

If I’m looking for stuff, I’ll search Google or I’ll visit del.icio.us (human indexed web).

The del.icio.us database gives all its content to ItemRank, you visit del.icio.us, plug in your APML file, and see stuff according to your APML attention file…wow, I see just what I want to see, it knows what I don’t like, everything I look at I’m interested in (this is the idea).

When I leave it updates my attention file of my granular experience, sculpturing my file even more, (this is a perpetual evolving file), and my current attention file is sent to del.icio.us so next time I visit, it knows me even more than it did last time.

What about visiting your local library or an online library like LibraryThing, you could visit a user, tag or the whole library and run it through your APML file.
The results will churn out books that you like, based on your past behaviour…spoonfed!!

Hmm, what happens if you don’t like something anymore, can you edit your attention file, to delete stuff out you are no longer interested in?

Could I use the attention file of another person, to see the world as them, and could I temporarily add it to my attention file, and plug that in as a social filter, rather than a personal filter?

Keep updated at the Engagd blog.

I’m about to try it now, and input my lifestream feed.

Pageflakes Blizzard - first a startpage, then introduced public topic pages (pagecasts), now they are a social network, something that was inevitable in this competitive arena.
Here is the profile directory, unlike Facebook you can’t actually see someone’s startpage or dashboard (Facebook does a good job of permissions in allowing people to only see certain parts of your dashboard).

Hmmm, Technorati Favourites is kind of like Pagecasts (only it’s not widgets, and feeds are grouped in tags instead of Pagecasts), and you can see an owners profile and add friends.
Yourminis is already doing it to, check out this random user, each profile has your widgets, favourite widgets, your pages (these are like pagecasts)…Yourminis also doubles up as a startpage.
Webjam is another pagecast site with a strong blog module and community feel check out this jam, but like Netvibes Universes it’s public, but not networked, although they do have a community module which has a touch of social networking. Webjam has 4 different module types.

Unizr - is a topic discussion forum, rove around groups and post away, nothing new…Tangler’s doing this with real-time chat and heading towards social networking, also see meebo room’s, chatango, chinswing for audio forums, and more IM rooms (Lingr, buddystumblr, IMVU, Tworl, Pibb)
CommonGate is similar but the topics are like blogs (it’s less geared for discussion), and then we have tag based forums (Vennt, TalkingHub, SayOutLoud, Tagsurf, Blogoforum, startplane)

See comment below, it seems Unizr has chat and also conference/group chat with your group…maybe same idea as YackPack.

SezWho - we have all seen rating blog posts, but what about rating comments on blog posts…then others can filter all the comments on the blog post by rating, instead of having to scan them all. Pretty nifty for blogs with comment heavy posts.
You can also hover over a commenters name to see their history of comments on that blog, plus you can see their history of comments on all the blogs they comment on…is this CoComment territory. For more on ratings and comments see here (scroll to topic headings) [via R/WW]

VelvetPuffin - multi-IM client with social networking features (including blog posting)…either get a desktop version or Rich Internet Application (RIA) version (meaning you can close the browser and use it as if it were a desktop app) [via WW]

Hiitch - another IM social networking app, this one is download only, also has file sharing…reminds me of Pownce a little. [via SS]

Chinswing is an audio chat room, kind of like a Chatango Public Group, but only it’s audio. Keep in mind it’s not real-time, you record a message, add a note…then press send.
You can bookmark conversations to join in later or add them to your watchlist or grab the podcast feed, that’s right since it’s audio each new message in a discussion becomes a new podcast item.
If you are after a click and talk check out Yackpack or any VOIP tool.

Check out the Enterprise Bloggers discussion on the Internet Channel…you don’t have to register to listen.

Each person has a profile page, see example.

Actually it really reminds me of Tangler, but for audio…I like that Tangler allows you to add friends and text chat to your friend. Here’s a Tangler profile for a comparison.

I wonder if Pownce or Jaiku Channels could incorporate audio.

Audio presence blogging is making an impact of late, not too much different that audio discussion forums:
Twittergrams, MySay, Yodio, Evoca, Pheeder…

I wonder when Chinswing will equip bloggers with widgets for their own blog discussion room, like the many text chat rooms
eg. meebo rooms (allows you to use your IM client), Planet Minibox, Chatango, Pladeo, Cbox, Tag-Board, Zonkboard, Nat1on, Zpeech, Gabbly, Yaplet…even Geesee and Creamaid to a lesser degree.

If you are after one to one using your IM account, check out Plugoo, meebome, or livechat2IM.

For related stuff check out my blog chat wasteland.

See my post, the various ways visitors can communicate with blog owners for some services I may not have mentioned.

At the moment the channel discussions are like community audio forums, I wonder if Chinswing will go beyond channel discussions, to personal posting like the presence blogging services (also limiting to contacts in the case of Pownce), and go the whole social network way by adding friends, and wall/private messages.

What I’m using on my blog

Plugoo (Private Chat)

Jaxtr (SMS-Voicemail-Call)

Cbox (Chat-Wall)