Library clips

COMMUNITY-NETWORK
Grouply - manage all the groups you belong to in one spot by getting all your emails in a digest, also has social networking (what doesn’t)…reminds of Fuser.
Also checkout Linqia, this is a place that has aggregated groups across the web so you can browse them in one spot…listen to a great podcast.

RSS-READER-NETWORK-BLOGS
Profy - an RSS Reader, blogging platform, and social network (send IM, msgs, add friends) in one, also see Buddypress.
I still like the idea for a distributed social network for the blogosphere.
[via TC]

BLOGS
CoveritLive - live blogging in that as you blog it’s being streamed (no need for a submit button), perhaps this is text streaming. Visitors can interact, take part in polls…what a great idea for events.
[via RWW]

RSS-NEWSMASTER-ATTENTION
Feedhub - upload your OPML and it’s claims it will learns your preferences and delivers items that you really want to see…it generates a feed so you can read these items in your RSS Reader. AideRSS does this sort of thing based on social popularity rather than personal…Particls is the most advanced tool in this space.
[via SF]

ATTENTION
Tiinker read and rate stories, and be recommended new stories…seems similar to Spotback (not sure if it’s still around).
[via RWW]

BONUS LINK
AideRSS now filters your Google Reader content by social popularity.
Also see more robust memetracking like in BlogBridge, FeedDemon, and others.

David Weinberger is our web 2.0 philosopher, I like his macro view of the read/write web…I’m yet to read Everything is Miscellaneous.

This post is nothing new, but it’s good to sit back once and a while and look at the big picture.

World of Physicality
- a newspaper is a physical object based around authority, a bunch of people decide what’s on our frontpage…one-to-many broadcast.

World of 1’s and 0’s
- this all changes online, because of the participative web we can choose the authority we like
- anyone can publish, collect and send links, upload stuff…many-to-many
- we subscribe and network within a social filter we trust
- basically we now make our own newspaper based on content from who we trust
- eg. Facebook, Google Reader, iGoogle, del.icio.us, YouTube, Twitter, FriendFeed, Toluu, wikis, mashup

This is bringing into light or fulfilling what the terms “personalisation” and “customisation” have always strived to mean; explicit and implicit “attention” come into the equation to form the recommendation web…people sometimes think this is what web 3.0 is about (I really don’t like that term).

The web is a massive document management system, and there’s no way we could search it daily to find stuff that interests us. So in comes Google with PageRank, meaning when I put in a search term the top hits will be pages that are popular, that is, a lot of other pages refer or point to this page.

This is good and all, but not good enough, we want to tune into stuff we like via our reading habits, but most of all via the popularity of our friends, that is, my social circle. This is where blogs, bookmarks (folksonomies), networks have changed everything…findability, filters, discovery, recommendation, serendipity, autonomy, collective intelligence, innovation, progress.

Up unitl now information has been dumped into not one, but various buckets, and you had to dredge through it. Instead now information is flowing and you tune into the flow, it’s so effortless and less frustrating. Stuff comes to your attention that you like, and this all happens because you participate…it’s about people, but even more, it’s the value in people connected (networks).

Email allowed people to send links eg. “check this out..”, “this is your sort of thing…”. But email is limited in discovery, you can’t tune into people, you are just pushed stuff, and it’s not visible or re-usable-it gets pushed to you, you can’t go find emails.
Instead of just sending links, people can also publish stuff they find, and others can subscribe..this makes information more public, and allows you to choose what you want to see to avoid information stress. When you augment this to a social network, this knowledge flows and is a two way connection, with plenty of serendipity.

David says we are now in an age of abundance, not scarcity - now we all get to choose our authors, and assemble our own news.

I no longer seek information from “experts”, rather from people I trust.

There is no longer a distinct line between performers and spectators, we can all be participants.

There’s no longer a circle with an authoritative centre and receivers (or the gullible) on the edges, instead it’s kind of shapeless it’s more an intertwined network that looks like scribble.

In marketing I learnt the SWOT analysis where “O” means “Opportunities”, I think web 2.0 and the flat world has well and truly capitalised on opportunity. When you are more in touch, and on the pulse, you see more relevant stuff go by…it’s not just about capitalising on them, it’s about coming across more of them to exploit.

fav.or.it is the latest social RSS Reader, just not sure if it is a social network.

RSS re-mixing

You read feeds (by category, rank or tag…also generate a spliced feed), comment on posts (even send to original blog), even blog posts, etc…

The screenshots show a profile page, I’m not sure if these are public, or if you can: add someone as a friend, msg friends, get recommended feeds…

Link sharing

There is plenty of link sharing going on, here’s a screenshot. Basically share links to external services like Twitter, and share links into your library, and make communal libraries…still not sur eif you can share a link to another user.

Attention

The rank works according to how long you read a post, in aggregate this will make it a powerful attention engine (there is also voting)…most services determine what’s popular or hot in the blogosphere based on inlinks and more (TechMeme), submit/vote (Digg), or clicks (Spotback).

Comment on blog posts without leaving

What a great idea to be able to not only comment with the fav.or.it network, but to also have that appear on the actual blog.
What about displaying current comments from the actual blog, and these being synched in fav.or.it as they appear in the actual blog posts.
For comments to appear on actual blog posts, these blogs need to hook up with the system via an API.
If you use Google Reader, try the Firefox hack to read and post comments.

You own blog

Wow, you don’t have to leave this place, you even get a blog…not sure if you can even auto-populate this blog via a feed, a la SuprGlu.
How it works is that you can blog posts that get included in the fav.or.it database for others to read, if you like you can also turn it on to publish these posts to an external blog.

What about clips streams like Google Reader, ie. saving or bookmarking posts which are displayed on stream pages and/or as a take away feed. It’s invite only at the moment, and the homepage does say you can re-publish stuff (even adding a description would be great)…it seems there is more in the works…aha re-publishing content.
I wonder if you could bookmark items you find outside fav.or.it into a clip stream…I guess you could use the inhouse blog as well.

Auto-tags

From the screenshots it seems to cluster similar posts together into tags, although I’m not sure if this is manual or done by the machine, actually the TechCrunch UK post mentions auto-tags.
This is what we see with MyFeedz, WizAg, Feeds 2.0 and others…this is like memetracking by topic. The only way you can do this in Google Reader is by searching for a term (this is just appearances of the term, not really a post being about that term).

Other RSS Readers like BlogBridge and FeedEye go the further mile by memetracking around a post, the most linked to posts in your RSS Reader are ranked to the top of your pile, and related posts are clustered around it.
Feedable does clustering, but not from items within your RSS Reader, rather items from the blogosphere.
SharpReader will cluster new and old posts around an item based on having links to these items.

Here’s a screenshot.

At this moment I’m not sure if it’s in the social network pack like: FeedEachOther, Streamy, and Genwi.

The other day I posted on knowledge diffusion and how effective knowledge management is more based on conversation rather than content. Now that we have the tools to effortlessly publish thoughts and discussion and be able to connect and subscribe to each other (people you trust as well as others) in a social network, we have a knowledge flow, where information comes to you, instead of you looking for it all the time…and it’s information you understand.

Blogs give us a way to participate and generate content, the message to the masses is no longer in a few hands (so to speak), in fact this is a social revolution of the media and perhaps the enterprise to follow…I consider video sites, podcasts, ideas and presence blogging in the same way.

Then we have sites we collect like social bookmarks, podcasts, video’s, documents, how-to’s, ideas, etc…

A way to consolidate the experience is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of all these sites in your RSS Reader.
You subscribe to your favourite blogger, favourite bookmarker, or perhaps you subscribe to a person’s lifestream (which includes all their blog posts, bookmarks, etc…)

Now the web comes to us, but this brings up a new issue of information overload

…I like that I no longer have to surf the web for this purpose, but now there’s too much stuff to keep up.

There are approaches like subscribing to category feeds, search feeds, only seeing content from your feeds based on past click behaviour (this kind of kills the serendipity factor, but at the same time these services usually recommend stuff outside of your feeds)…in saying this you can still choose to read all content, only ranked (based on your past clicks).

These are good methods (for more see my RSS Reader productivity post), but no matter how much you do this, there are always more feeds to subscribe to, you may feel you are missing out on stuff because your filters are too narrow, etc…

Social Filtering

The answer is social filtering, and it’s what you are doing anyway when you subscribe to blogs.
If we think about it, the author of every blog we subscribe to subscribes to lots of feeds, and in turn, those people subscribe to lots of feeds.
Then you move on to the next person in your RSS reader…..see my post, Blog network as your social filter.
When I choose to subscribe to a blog, I’m getting their view of the world based on their own insights and the blogs they subscribe to, so I’m trusting not only someone’s interpretation/understanding of what they read, but I’m also trusting their sources…who in turn have their own source filter, etc…

In my post, The many aspects of attention, the aim is to drop lots of feeds as other blogs will pick up stuff from these feeds, stuff that matters will surface.

But how can the RSS reader experience be more a social filtering flow experience.

Social Networks

Blogs are a way to share what’s on our mind, they also act as discussion and a social filter.
Blog communities or networks are distributed in nature and very blurry, they are based blogs I read, comment and link to…it’s my individual centric view of the blogosphere. Other blogs I read, comment, link to also have their own view, we may find overlap in these circles where a number of blogs read, comment and link to the same core blogs, some sort of ethereal blog community.

The way we read blogs is via an RSS Reader, and trackbacks/comments are tracked and saved via other tools, this is very disjointed, what is even more isolated is that we are only connected to content, not people.

This is where an RSS Reader social network would come in to play, the experience is more enhanced as I could subscribe to the blog, and also add the author as a friend.
Now I’m not only getting a view of the authors world via their blog, but now I can connect to them, I can share links, we can talk, I can see what they read, who they are connected to, what they talk about with their friends, what their friends read, what their status is, ask them questions, etc…

As we can see this is much easy to keep tabs on if our RSS Readers were public and joined in a social network…it totally augments the social filter scenario.

The extra beauty of an RSS Reader social network, like FeedEachOther, is that you can be recommended feeds, see another person’s feed collection, and explicitly send people links in to their reading stream. So not only are you relying on what people you trust blog and collect, but they can also send you stuff they think you will like.

Example

Not long ago Jack Vinson and Luis Suarez shared some of their Reading List, blogrolls are a good source as well.

All 3 of us read a lot of the same blogs, some of these have consistently quality posts and have great authors, these are my essential subscriptions.
But I have chosen to drop feeds that only have the occassional quality post (according to me), in the confidence that Jack and Luis are still subscribed to them, and that the occassional quality post from these feeds will surface in one of Jack’s or Luis’s blog posts or bookmark links.

So I’m relying and trust my social filter for quality content, firstly I like what they blog, and I have a high abstraction relationship where I am confident stuff that I don’t read that I like will “come to me”.

What else I found is that these guys are also my social filter for sources, just when trusting my social filter helps me relieve information overload, it also may occassionaly turn the tables, I may find and subscribe to new blogs my filter are posting about. Then these blogs have their own Reading List/blogrolls and their archive of content, may point to other quality blogs…
Anyway, this is usually a good thing, it’s recommendation to sources via your social filter, how much more relevant can you get!

What about for topics that are not your focus of interest.
I have a mild interest in the mobile web, I have chosen 3 or 4 blogs to subscribe to, a few of these are group blogs and do a great job of covering the blogosphere.
I find it so easy that even if I have a mild interest in something it doesn’t take me much to get updated on the latest, I don’t need to get too involved to find content and sources, all I do is find a few quality blogs, and the “web comes to me”, people are our filter to the web.

Putting this all together, let’s see how much smoother the experience would be if my blog subscriptions were also my friends in a social network.

I subscribe to and read my favourite blogs…here’s where a network does more…
If the authors of these blogs used the same RSS Reader I could add them as friends.
This means I could visit their profile and connect to their profile:
- see their friends (mutual friends)…recommendation
- see their feeds (mutual feeds)…recommendation
- I can private/public message them
- I can share links with them directly
- I can see their status or presence
- I can comment on the posts in the network and on the original post
- I can see their bookmarks
- activity or newsfeed will update me on what my friends are doing

I can also add friends that may not author blogs but enjoy reading, now I have a way to show off my reading list, exchange links, and communicate…they can see my history of interactions and content.

Coming full-circle this starts to become an expert network, each person/blog could have expert tags.

Most people use Google Reader these days, imagine if this was a social network, I could add friends (especially blog authors), we could read each others content, share links, see saved link stream (not quite social bookmarks), send messages, be recommended to feeds and people (make lots of weak ties).

This moves from a social filter to a social network or circle.

Social Dashboard

RSS Readers and bookmarks are not the only type of content, other places we can network and share are; presentations like Slideshare, presence blogging like Twitter, Lifestreams like Mugshot, the list goes on for videos, podcasts, documents, idea’s, link sharing, etc…

The next question, is that it’s great that we can have knowledge flow based on different networks that deal with different content types, but what about a central place to manage it all?

This is where startpages come into the equation, from one dashboard like Facebook or Netvibes you can see all your content, plus this startpage is within a social network itself.

But, although you can interact with people in your startpage network, this model lacks interaction with people in all your other networks, the idea is not just a place to manage your content, but also one place to interact with content and people from all your networks.

eg. from this central dashboard how do I share a link with my friend in my RSS Reader social network, or share a bookmark with my del.icio.us friends (linkforyou).

An alternative to a startpage is a Lifestream service like Ziki (also a social network itself), these services consolidate content from your various profiles into a stream rather than widgets. The difference is that Startpages allow the user more control to add lots of other types of widgets like email, games, IM, etc…so a startpage is a productivity space as well. In saying this we do see lifestream services like Plaxo Pulse, that are also an address book, notes, tasks, etc…

The one thing a Lifestream service usually has incorporated is a friendstream, so now you have all your friends content in one stream. The difference here compared to an RSS Reader network is that when you add a friend to your lifestream you are adding them as well as their content at the same time, and it’s not usually just their blog content, you are updated on all sorts of profile activity (their bookmarks, video’s, documents, etc…).

What I see lacking in a lifestream network is the ability to mark/unmark items in your friendstream, ie. RSS Reader type features. Most allow you to sort the stream content by person, or content type, or even inhouse groups to organise people…kind of like tag folders, I haven’t really seen a way to organise people in topic tags.
A service called Spokeo enables you to subscribe to just content type by friends eg. only your friends Flickr photo’s and nothing else, if your friends also have a Spokeo account, you can subscribe to their actual account as a subscription in your Spokeo reader.

Both lifestream and RSS Reader networks enable group creation as a communal place to share a set of subscriptions (usually the lifestreams of the members and some external feeds), and to be able to explictly add internal/external items into the stream…see Onaswarm and Mugshot groups.

The next step is the read/write lifestream where you can interact with all your friends from your various networks, and where you can upload and post content, all from the one spot…a digital dashboard for your personal and social life.

Let’s hope that Google’s Socialstream project enables you to do all your activities within the one spot and also connect with your friends, and be updated about your friends…also see Lifestrea.ms.

Our social network environment is key for knowledge flow; social filtering, activity updates, sharing, communicating, requests, etc…our new issue is interoperability so we can unify all our social network activities.

[ADDED 13/12/07: Knowledge network filter and sources]

The other week I posted on searching your social filter, and your blog network as your social filter, one of the main players in this field is Lijit, where you can search across your lifestream and Reading List. You can also add others Lijit users to your search filter, so you are searching across the filter of you and someone else, or you could just choose to visit that other users profile and search their Lijit.

Anyway the purpose was that social filtering is a way to deal with the enormity of the web, and achieve some quality by searching people you trust as a filter. These people you trust have interests similar to yours, people you admire, people that are experts in a field, so searching across these people you know is a perfect filter. If you are researching a new interest, you may search an expert locator/lifestream service like Lijit or Ziki and find someone’s profile and search their filter.

Social filter can work in other ways other than search, we can share our RSS Reader subscriptions on the sidebar of our blogs by using a Grazr widget, or join a RSS Reader social network like FeedEachOther or Streamy and browse someones profile, read their feed subscriptions and share links…or share your OPML at an exchange type service like SYO.

BlogRovr

Another way to use a social filter is BlogRovr, which I briefly mentioned a little while back.
This totally unique tool built on a simple idea has become an instant addition to my regular web 2.0 daily experience.

How it works?

Upload a bunch of feeds by importing your OPML Reading List.

From now on when you browse the web, if any of the subscriptions in your Reading List have, in one of their blog posts, linked to the webpage you are currently on, you will be able to read these blog posts.

How cool is that…surf to anypage on the web, and pleasantly be told if people you trust have talked about this site in the past.

If there is breaking news about an article or a new website, instead of searching your RSS Reader to see who has posted about it, just surf to the webpage everyone is talking about, and BlogRovr will tell and show who in your OPML has posted about it.

Now I’m coming to the purpose of this post…what if I want to see who else other than people in my OPML is talking about the newest hot website.

I guess I could consult a memetracker like TechMeme or megite.

NOTE: Megite also allows you to personalise a memetracker to your OPML.

Back to it…

What if at the BlogRovr website I could add friends, not really a social network, but just making a favourites list.

When I am reading a webpage, I could ask BlogRovr to show me content through someone else’s eyes.

eg. I’m reading a webpage about the latest web 2.0 product

- BlogRovr tells me who in my OPML has already posted about this product

- I can ask BlogRovr, who else has posted about this product according to friends A’s OPML,

- and I wonder if there are any posts from friends B’s OPML, and so on

- and maybe saying, show me posts about this webpage from all my BlogRovr friends, or just a group of my BlogRovr friends

This way I can surf the web and get reviews not just throught my immediate social filter, but the social filters of my friends.

What about mashing up BlogRovr and Techmeme…Adam Green already has a mashup where he can make a dynamic OPML of the sources that have a current post on TechMeme.

If I was looking at a webpage, I could ask BlogRovr, tell me if any of the sources that have a current post on TechMeme have posted about this page I’m viewing.

Same goes with the TechMeme Leaderboard, a Top 100 list of TechMeme sources.

When I’m on a webpage I could ask BlogRovr, tell me who has posted about this webpage from people in the TechMeme Leaderboard.

What about topics, I could ask BlogRovr, who in the Technorati blog topic “wiki” has posted about this webpage I’m on.

Any thoughts?

[ADDED: If you include your own blog feed into BlogRovr…you can find out which of all your blog posts have linked to one of your blog posts]

[ADDED: BlogRovr is a feature of a bigger product called Stickis…annotate the page you are on, and see other stickis people who have already annotated the page you are on…see more. Basically a sticky note blog social network.]

[ADDED: While we are there why not include some type of live impressions of a webpage, by being able to chat with others on the same page…a la Gabbly, Others Online, etc… NOTE: medi.um is more than this as you can click on a friends profile to see where there at, and join them at that webpage and chat, and then browse to other webpages together.]

[ADDED 11/11/07: Blogbar : search your outlink sources]

Jack Vinson has amplified my post on the searching part of your social filter, the other part I discussed was networking.

This post is a round up of a few ways to search your social filter:

DIY HTML search engine

Create a search engine (searchroll) at Rollyo, this will search the HTML of all the blogs, bookmark users, Twitter users, etc…
You could make 3 Rollyo search engines, one for all your favourite blogs, one for bookmark tags or users, and for for Twitter users. Each of your search engines can be accessible via a fancy bookmarklet or widget.

Google Custom Search like Rollyo lets you enter a number of sites to search and gives you a public page and a widget, make as many as you want, even load sites by OPML (it searches HTML)…see here, and more.

You can also make a custom search engine on-the-fly, by putting some code into your blog, it will pick up all the links on your blog pages and provide a search box to search those links…hmmm something Snap Shots could get into.

[ADDED 12/10/07: Forgot to mention you can give others edit rights]

RSS Reader search

Google Reader allows you to search all your subscriptions, by feed or tag…so there you go, straight off you have a social filter by default…not bad at all…Steve Rubel has really taken advantage of this for data mining purposes.

Communal Search Engine

Swicki is a communal search engine, see more…for our purposes you can enter your favourite websites and search your social filter.

RSS grazing

Put in all your favourite blogs, bookmark users or friends lifestreams and with some Grazr scripting you can search this social filter…see here and more.

Lifestream network

In all the examples above instead of entering the feeds of all your favourite bloggers and bookmarkers, you could add their lifestream feeds, if they have one.

One place you can make a lifestream is at Ziki by adding the feeds from your web 2.0 profiles, then you can search your lifestream, even limit to a feed. Since Ziki is also a social network you can add friends, then you can search your friends lifestreams…nice social filtering. In fact you can search the whole of Ziki, making it a general people search engine. Add a Ziki search engine to your browser.
Ziki also allows you to enter your Reading List, ie. blogs you read, I guess your lifestream is a personal filter of all the blogs you read and other content…but you can’t search your Reading List…yes you can.

So you can search your content (lifestream) and your Ziki friends content (your network), but this is your Ziki social filter, what about searching your Reading List as well…see below for the finale.

DIY Social filter engine

Lijit is similar to Ziki, you add your lifestream (which you can search in, even limit to a feed), I don’t think you can add friends (it seems you can add other users to your network, only I can’t see an add friend button), instead what you can do is add your Blogroll (Reading List), your del.icio.us network, your MyBlogLog community or add any feeds you like creating a true social filter search engine (your social filter)…they have a handy widget.

It pays off blogging about this stuff.

As Jack Vinson alludes to why search the web everytime, when you can search your social filter…you have gathered sources you trust, and sources your sources trust, and so on.
Searching your network is a great quality filter for the web…perhaps the attention web.

[ADDED 12/10/07: Lijit could extend it’s offering to include some lifestream services, this way you could add a friends lifestream…saves you adding their bookmarks, blog individually.

The difference between Ziki and Lijit is Ziki is a social network experience, you can only search you and your Ziki friends. Lijit allows you to add other Lijit users to your network, but it also allows you to add feeds from people that are not registered with Lijit…this makes it a more complete social filter (not limited to a system).

As I mentioned Ziki allows you to add your Reading List, but this is not included in the search, so really they are one step away from including external feeds into your search filter, just like Lijit.

Something I forgot to mention is that you can visit someone’s Ziki or Lijit page and search the world through their eyes.

So not only do you have your social filter, but you can search the social filter of others…by adding them to your network or by visiting their profile.

See a post from Stan of Lijit that has a good visual explanation.]

[ADDED 23/10/07: Blog network as your social filter]

[ADDED 23/10/07: BlogRovr as social filter]

[ADDED 11/11/07: Blogbar : search your outlink sources]

Yesterday I posted a list of blogs I am enjoying reading at the moment, in the post I asked the people on this list to post a list of blogs they like to read.

Do I really want to know what Jack Vinson (Knowledge Jolt with Jack) or any of the others are reading, the last thing I want is more feeds to read. I’m happy for Jack to read his feeds and use him as a social filter…he points me to (ie. he blogs about) great stuff from blogs he reads and stuff these blogs point to, saves me from reading all these blogs.
When he points to other blogs, in his blog posts, I’ll check out their archives to see if it will make my Reading List, if I find there are only occassional posts I like, I’ll just wait for Jack to post about it.

In essense our Reading list is our social filter, each feed owner reads feeds of their own, reads stuff these feeds link to, reads stuff friends email them about, etc. I was going to include surfing the net, but I don’t really do that for stuff I’m interested in, all that comes to me via RSS as a starting block, and then I’m off on a hyperlink trail. The starting block is important, if it’s quality it will point to more quality posts, and so on.
I guess you have to choose your social filter (feeds you subscribe to) carefully…you know when you see a good feed as it’s posts consistently fill your interests, and enlighten you to new interests.

I like to choose a selection of blogs that have quality insight, and some others that point to quality stuff…we can’t read every blog, newspaper, and journal that’s out there, so it’s handy to read a feed that is like a type of clearinghouse on a topic.

In fact sometimes you can subscribe up to less than 5 feeds, and they will cover a good portion of a whole topic eg. these days you only need to subscribe to about 5 feeds about the latest web 2.0 stuff, even though there is hundreds of them.

NOTE: Lijit is a lifestream service with social filtering…you can search sources you trust.

When I research a social web topic, I don’t surf the web I consult the blogs on my Reading List, I search these blogs, and I get lots of useful insight and pointers to other blog posts…I check out the blogs on the blogroll and search these blogs, etc…I save so much time searching my social filter and social graph (dare I say it), and I get fresh, quality content.

Back to it…

So if these 20 blogs, refered to at the start of this post, along with some others are my social filter, then why do I need to be in a blog social network…my network of blogs are already in my RSS Reader, each blogger I subscribe to is my social filter.

But what if I could have 2 way networking with these guys, besides adding them as contacts, (which I regard is kind of similar to what you do when you subscribe to a blog), what if I could message them (similar to email), IM them, comment on their blog in general (like a comment wall), send them links, ask them questions, etc…
I can do most of these things with these guys, I just need to hunt around their blog homepages for email and IM details to send them links or ask questions, or comment about their blog in general.

A blog social network makes this so much easier (your contacts in context) as you already have a dashboard for your contacts, communications are archived in the one spot, the other thing is you can visit their profiles and find out what they read, and who are their friends, instead of writing top blog list posts like I did yesterday, and tagging people on that list to post about blogs they like to read…so cumbersome.

You also have the benefit of asking an aggregate of people the same thing in one go, or friends that can’t help you may hook you up with someone else in the network that could be of assistance…not only do you get a new answer, you get a new contact…the power of the network.

Another handy thing about networking with your RSS Reader subscription list is that you can share links, you might say that people are sharing links in their blog posts, so you are receiving these links anyway. But what if Jack Vinson comes across a link that he wouldn’t blog about, but he knows I would blog about it, he can ping it to me in one second.

Immersed in the ‘Internet Human Buzz’ sums this all up:

““The Net’s killer app has always been other people. There are side benefits, like access to all the world’s information. But the links that matter aren’t between pages but people, and they’re strong and rich and subtle. Multiply the infinite flavors in human relationships by a thickening bundle of means-to-connect; that product is what’s new and what’s good and what’s exciting.””

At the moment we are stuck with email, or del.icio.us links for you (problem is here, you may just want to send the link without having to bookmark it in your own collection)…specific link sharing tools like Siphs, Google Shared Stuff or ShareThis come in handy.
Link sharing tools are specific as you are explicitly sent a link, as opposed to reading the stream of your del.icio.us networks or people’s Google Reader Shared Items.

So we have handy tools for communicating with people, reading feeds, sharing links…but all these in a dashboard that hook you up with your contacts in a network just makes more sense.

I think the future of information consumption is the efficiency of the RSS Reader coupled with the effectivness of the social network.

Two services making inroads into this space are Streamy and FeedEachOther…I mentioned that MyBlogLog could be another.

So what’s it gonna be, where will our blog social network be, will it be a lifestream (social network) like Ziki, or an RSS Reader (social network) like FeedEachOther, or a link sharing network like Bzzster or absorbed into a greater social network like Facebook, or a better version of a blog network like MyBlogLog.

Or will be wait for Google to announce something, supposedly on November 5th…more from Rex’s Thought Spot and TechCrunch.

Related:
Lifestream Groups
RSS Smarts
The many aspects of attention
Blog networks or blog communities?

[ADDED 23/10/07: Searching your social filter]

[ADDED 23/10/07: BlogRovr as social filter]

[ADDED 11/11/07: Blogbar : search your outlink sources]

Feed Each Other (FEO) has come out of its invite beta mode, and we get lots more since I last posted, infact I think it’s pioneering what Google Reader plans to be, a social network RSS Reader with profiles, Shared items, feed and people recommendations, messaging, etc…

From the blog post release:

“Feed Each Other lets you harness the power of your network of friends and colleagues to help you filter and explore the web […] Wouldn’t it be nice to know which feeds your friends subscribe to? Shouldn’t you be able to find new feeds by topic? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could browse feeds related to your subscriptions? Shouldn’t you be able to share things that you find in your reader without clogging up your friend’s email? How great would it be if your reader could automatically point you towards other interesting, like-minded people?”

Udi, ex Yahoo! Answers, and the creator of FEO has really honed in on the power of people as your information filter, and what better than to drop your RSS Reader into a social network…see more on people as your attention filter, I quoted an excerpt on my previous FEO post.

It’s really giving Streamy (another social network RSS Reader) a run for its money, basically the same thing without IM, groups, lifestreams/friendstreams, and blog notes. Without these features FEO is still feature packed with the essentials, and the design is very easy to understand.

Plus FEO has lots of recommendation and discovery.

Both FEO and Streamy are the ideal RSS Reader environment, just a glimpse of the future readers to come.

The FEO RSS Reader is what lets it down for me, I need to be able to mark stuff as read, but according to their FAQ, they have intentionally gone with a different approach.

Let’s revisit the functions and features.

RSS Reader

- feeds with new items are starred (instead of the regular bold)

- read by feed or river of news (called a channel…what we call tag or folder)

- we have a problem, you can’t mark/unmark read items (as soon as you click a feed to read the star disappears and it’s considered read…next time you click this feed all items will be there but you won’t remember if you have read them or not)

- options allows you to re-title, automatically expire the subscription (never, day, week, month), make it public/private, change the folder it lives in

SOCIAL/RECOMMENDATION

- the subscribers link is an info page about the feed and it list other FeedEachOther users who have also subscribed to this feed, and also recommendations of other feeds based on what other readers of this feed read…clicking one of the feeds takes you to that feeds info page.
Just like Streamy, a feed profile page, reminds me of a feed community page like MyBlogLog

- when we are reading a feed, our sidebar again has recommended feeds and also related tags
(these tags must be channels people use to organise a feed)

Clicking on a tag takes us to a discover page, so basically you can discover feeds by channel names people assign to them…we also get a cloud of related tags to the tag you are viewing, and also a list of feeds with this tag, also showing latest shared items from the FEO community (all these shared items must come from feeds which are tagged with that channel)

Whoa, this is great for discovery and recommendation of people and feeds.

MyBlogLog really needs to add something substantial to its service, otherwise what do you do there, if they added an RSS Reader and link sharing, then we’d have a reason to hangout…they are only winning people over with a feature, it’s recent readers widget.

RSS ITEMS/ARTICLES

- see comments from the native post
Marshall from R/WW seems to like this one and wishes you could post a comment to the native blog post from within FEO (there is an RSS Reader that can do this, I forget which one).

- clip it to read later (feeds that have clipped items have a blue icon)

- share it (with your FEO fans, co-workers, family, friends or indivduals, even create your own contact groups)
What about sharing items with people who don’t use FEO, see more.

- Leave a comment (note) on the shared item
When you share an item you can annotate a note (commenting)
The first person to comment on this item will have the annotation on the top of the article, if you comment on this item later on, your comment will be in the comments section.

Keep in mind, in order to comment on an item, you have to share it…this is inbuilt so your network is notified of your comment.
I guess you can share the same item lots of times if you keep commenting on it…not sure if this is true, I can’t leave 2 comments in a row, maybe I have to wait for someone to reply to my comment, before I can comment again.

- archive it (save it)
There is also a way to tag items, if you tag items you have not archived there is no way to see them, but if you tag items you have archived, then you can browse your archived items by tag; if you archive items without tagging them you can still see them but not browse them by tag…there is even a related archive tags
Archive and tags should be in the one button.

At this stage, could FEO not only be a social network RSS Reader and link sharing, but a social bookmarks or memedigger service as well…since we archive and tag items doesn’t this make for a social bookmarking framework.

It’s a toss up between Share items and Archive items, which one of these features could be a social bookmarks. You share items because you think their hot, or you could share an item that doesn’t interest you, but you know your friend will like it…you archive items because you like them.

So that’s feeds, what about my stuff.

Here we have a link to all our Shared items, clipped items, archive items, and inbox (that’s right you can add friends and send/receive private messages)

You can visit another user, add them as a contact, share items, and private message.

Profile

When you visit a users profile you can view their
- shared links
- contacts (network, fans)
- subscriptions (and OPML)
- like minded people (people who are similar to you, probably based on subscriptions, what they archive, clip, share, and contacts).

Contacts

Network - people we have added
Fans - people who have added you
(manage your network into groups, create your own groups to organise people).

Shared items by your network

A stream of stuff your network has shared.
- also has a feed
-filter by contact group…these also have feeds

I’d like to see this when I visit someone elses profile, see what there network is sharing, maybe I could find a few items/feeds/people this way

Dashboard

This is basically like the Facebook News feed, see your contacts activity, what they are:
- subscribing to
- sharing
- adding contacts, and other activity

Mirror

This is basically like the Facebook Mini feed, how your activity will look in your fan’s dashboards
- I can’t see another users Mirror, this would be handy so you can check out their activity to get to know them more before considering requesting to be a fan

More

Share
- search and browse people via the Share icon.

Discover
- the Discover icon is the latest shared items in the FEO community organised by category, each item having related tags.
Clicking on a tag shows a list of feeds with this tag, also showing latest shared item from the FEO community (all these shared items must come from feeds which are tagged with that tag…also shows related tags).

Search
- subscribe to keyword search, lists some tags similar to that keyword, and lists feeds with those tags

What’s missing according to me

- mark/unmark read
- comment wall
- note blogging
- mutual friends
- lifestream and friendstream
- IM

FEO and Streamy have lots in common, especially the network type features:
- profiles, messages, adding friends, shared items stream

FEO goes the whole way with recommendations and discovery, and the marvellous dashboard and mirror activity streams.

Streamy has a few other features like; lifestreams, IM, groups, drag and drop, note blogging.

Either of these new breed of RSS Readers are killers!

Megite discover which I posted back in May, has added a bookmarking feature.

Megite’s main service is the memetracker, this works on it’s own to bring you the hottest stuff of the day, you can even enter your OPML so it’s the hottest stuff according to your feed set (it also throws in some recommended posts).

They also have a discover engine as a way to find the hottest posts by entering a topic query, or enter a URL and get related links and also topics for that URL.

It has now expanded into bookmarking, when you play with megite discover you can choose to save a link right there within your megite user space. You can also use a bookmarklet to bookmark links you find outside of megite…what we have is a memetracker and discovery engine allowing users to now bookmark links it finds in the engine and outside of the engine.

Hmmm, what about being able to bookmark stuff you find on the main megite memetracker site.

If you find a handy bookmark on the web will you bookmark it in megite or del.icio.us?

If you find a handy bookmark in megite discover will you bookmark it within megite discover or del.icio.us?

Related:
megite : Memetracker for a single blog

Like FeedEachOther and Spokeo, Streamy is a Social Network RSS Reader, but it’s also a lifestream social network.

Streamy is currently in private beta so my analysis may be helpful but I gather some features are just not ready yet.

RSS Reader

- Add a RSS or OPML or choose from the directory
- Create search feeds (filter), even limited to a few sources…it would be good to limit this to your subscriptions
- read river of news or by feed via the subscription pane (also create folders)
- mark page as read
- 3 views: list, summary, full
- click on title of an item: save, share, comment

You have a save stream (lacks tags) and also a share stream (not posts you shared, but posts your friends have shared with you)

Each feed has its own profile page (called community), it’s starting to remind of MyBlogLog
- Recent posts
- Stats
- Subscribers

There is also a general homepage, with contents by category…it lists recommended posts

Notes

You can post notes, kind of like blog posting, these are mixed into your lifestream…notes don’t have replies

Profile

- manage your saved items and filters
- your location and friends location on Google Maps
- list of friends (can’t see a friendstream within my space)
[UPDATE 13/09/07: you can’t see a friendstream, it’s more of an action stream or share stream as mentioned above, of your friends notes and link sharing, they call this “downstream”]
- IM
- I don’t see private messages
- I don’t see a comment wall
- subscription list
- filter list
- lifestream (notes and save items also appear in this stream)
…what about comments I leave everywhere, where are they stored
…can’t filter lifestream by type, can’t see just my notes (when I click on my friends list, it has a link to their notes archive, I just can’t get to my own)
- list of lifestream sources…can’t add a feed to my lifestream, can only select networks from a list
- groups

Groups

This is when we get into Group lifestreams, like Mugshot (only Mughot doesn’t have an RSS Reader module).

- members
- forum
- group chat
- notes…appear in the group stream (these don’t seem to appear in my personal lifestream)
- group stream also displays a title of a shared item (I thought it would have another stream as a members mixed lifestream, like Mugshot)
- then there is a Share stream (these are the items shared by group members…I know the group stream has this, but the shared stream has the actual shared item).
…a share stream page looks like a feed subscription, others can subscribe to it, just like they subscribe to a blog feed
…like a blog feed has a community page, a share stream has a group homepage.

Networks

This feature is not working for me yet, but perhaps it’s groupings of people based on common data, like location, kind of an on-the-fly informal group shared stream based on similar subscriptions, or similar location, etc…

[UPDATE 13/09/07: this is a list of groups and friends, clicking one can start a chat session]

Search

People (lacks people tags), Stories, Groups, Sources

Drag and Drop

Click on a story title and drag
- bubbles appear to share, save or email the story

Click on a feed source and drag
- bubbles appear to community page, subscribe, browse stories

Click on a user and drag
- bubbles appear to send IM, see profile, see save stream

Click on a group and drag
- bubbles appear to group chat, group home, group thread (forum), group share stream

Also drag an object on a person or a group…drag a person into an IM chat

Summary

Streamy is a work in progress but it’s quite an achievement, a social network around an RSS Reader, share links and chat with friends, infact create explicit share groups and streams (which can also be subscribed to).

This is what it’s all about, having your own subscriptions…and being able to network and share links, capitalising on friends as an attention filter.

The groups feature takes it that step further, imagine this…a group of friends each have an RSS Reader and share links into 10 topics, these 10 topics contain quality posts on these topics based on your friends. If another 10 people had a similar group you may not like the links they share in this topic…so it’s all based on your network of friends, as you know what each other like, plus you can learn more about each other by using forums and chat, and leaving notes.

Now just say an 11th friend comes around and joins Streamy, but they don’t want to join your groups and they don’t want to subscribe to feeds, even feed filters aren’t qualitative enough, they don’t like wasting time reading through posts they don’t like…an hour a day is very precious.
But what they can do is subscribe to the 10 share feeds from each of the 10 groups, since they have the same degree of interest as you, they know these posts will be quality posts.

So this friend is not subscribing to feeds, but subscribing to 10 social circle attention filtered feeds, each on a topic. This is a great way to read news, no feed overload, no wasting half your day, no frustration, just reading quality posts one after another…what you don’t see won’t matter as it would of surfaced to the top as you have 10 friends (your trust filter) on the case plucking out just the gems.

Check out the Webware blog for some preview screenshots.

I’ve got 2 Streamy invites, who’s up!