Over the last few months, a plethora of tools — addons, scripts, Web apps — have emerged using the FriendFeed API. Here is a list of the top 10 Web applications that you can check out to get the most out of the service.

Which do you use? Tell us more in the comments.

NoiseRiver

NoiseRiver adds some neat extra functionality to FriendFeed, like rating other users and shared items with keywords and descriptions such as ‘I love it’ or ‘I don’t care.’ Another nice NoiseRiver feature is that it gathers all the comments clusters about the same subject and groups them in one place so that you don’t have comments about one particular topic scattered all over. You can also share video and audio on FriendFeed.This is one of those applications that might tempt you to use it permanently instead of the normal FriendFeed site.

FriendFeed Spy

FriendFeed Spy is a fun and useful FriendFeed Web application. The site displays the FriendFeed public timeline with every new shared item appearing automatically on top of the page, without you having to refresh the page. You can choose to pause the scroll if you want. You can comment or like any shared item on FriendFeed Spy and it will reflect on FriendFeed. The scroll has a ‘filter by services’ option as well. For example, you can choose to see only items that FriendFeed users have dugg, twitted, or bookmarked in Delicious.

FriendFeed Links

FriendFeed Links is a meme tracker that finds all the links shared on FriendFeed and displays them neatly with the names of FriendFeed users who have shared them. There is a homepage section where you will find the links shared by the most number of people, a Digg section that shows stories dugg the most number of times, recently popular links, and recent stories. You can also customize FriendFeed Links by links shared with various services such as Digg, Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Netvibes, and Delicious; order by number of shares or item dates; keywords, or sorted by items in a specific time period.

FriendFeedMachine

FriendFeedMachine is a neat FriendFeed Web application that displays your FriendFeed friends along with the icons of various services they use to share items on FriendFeed. When you click on one of these icons it displays the latest items that your friends have shared using that service. You can view that item without having to leave the site, thanks to a nicely implemented sliding window. 

The basic idea behind FriendFeedMachine is that currently FriendFeed shows you the shared items of your friends chronologically and sometimes you might miss out on what your real friends have been posting. FriendFeedMachine seeks to resolve that issue by listing individuals instead. You can even choose to set your ‘Close Friends’ from your contacts.

MioNews

MioNews is another FriendFeed Web application with some nice features like bringing you stories according to the preferences you set, in a reading pane similar to that of MS Outlook.  The left hand sidebar lists your topics of interest, FriendFeed rooms, and your friends. Your friends and rooms can be grouped in folders. You can also use MioNews to post entries to your blog, Twitter, and FriendFeed simultaneously. There is also a browser bookmarklet that you can use to share stories to MioNews.

FriendFeed Grid

FriendFeed Grid is a fun Web application that provides nice looking grids of the profile pictures of various FriendFeed users segregated by ‘20 most subscribed to users,’ ‘10 most commenting users’ and just ‘random users.’ When you hover your mouse on each picture, the profile names are displayed. There is also a list of 500 FriendFeed public rooms with the highest number of members, and a list of top 100 most linked to pages in FriendFeed. Then there is an interesting image comparison tool as well, though not useful, might make you smile a bit.  

FriendFeed Like Compatibility Calculator

FriendFeed Like Compatibility Calculator, like the names suggests, calculates and displays FriendFeed users who have shared the most number of likes with you. Talk about who shares the most common interests with you on Friendfeed, use this tool to find out. You can filter the calculation by opting to include other commenters, posts you have commented on, and users whose posts you liked the most.

Frienderati

Frienderati is an Alltop page displaying the top FriendFeed users and their most recent shared items. As Alltop mentions in its site, this page can be a good starting point to find FriendFeed users who you can check out and follow, if you are a complete newbie on FriendFeed.

Moopz

Moopz is an interesting tool that aggregates separate conversations, links, and likes on a particular topic on FriendFeed and presents them in a single combined thread. Moopz also tries to provide a summary and image of each item and also tags each item automatically. There is also a list of most active conversations in the last 24 hours. This could be a nice way of reducing the noise on FriendFeed and choosing items to follow more clearly.

FriendFeed Embed

FriendFeed Embed, coming straight from FriendFeed, is a recently launched collection of widgets that you can embed on your blog or sites. The FriendFeed badge shows off your profile picture, number of likes and comments, and the various services you use. There is also a ‘Share on FriendFeed’ link and a feed widget, chiclet widget, and a status widget. The tool has been much awaited and soon we are likely to see many bloggers using these widgets. It’s definitely worth a mention on this list.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Mashable Rocks: Connect with us on FriendFeed
FriendFeed for iPhone Coming - I’ve Waited For This All My Life
FriendFeed Launches Search
FriendFeed Recommendations? Who Are You Likely to Like?
FriendFeed Gets $5M, Launches to the Public
Former Googlers Team Up to Launch FriendFeed
FriendFeed Brings Twitter Back

We covered SocialMedian’s Beta launch earlier this summer, and since then they’ve been listening to their members. After several weeks of feedback and hundreds of suggestions, they’ve just announced their first major release with several major changes to the service. Here are the four new core features:

News-Streaming

SocialMedian calls this feature News-Streaming because it allows you to create a News-specific form of content streaming and connects your social networking feeds to SocialMedian to get just the right content shared to the right people and pages. For example, you can share specific news-related tweets or photos from Flickr, but not your Pownce messages. To add links and feeds there’s a new SITE option next to the Snip and News tabs.

The key to this feature is a powerful filtering system that can help you share only the content that you want to share based on the keywords that you specify. The options are plentiful and can be as granular as you want them to be. The same process works with many popular sites such as Digg, Delicious, Google Reader, etc.

Reverse-Blog Widget

This feature allows users to promote their own blogs on SocialMedian through the use of a new widget. After setting up the feed to their blog, the widget is displayed whenever anyone is reading or commenting on a story from that blog on SocialMedian. This will also be the case if they are reading about someone’s blog via a share from Google Reader or Delicious, etc. This is a good idea because it gives credit not just to the person who shared the content, but also to the original source of the content. In the future, this widget will be customizable so bloggers can change the way it looks, the colors, add their logo, etc.

Better ways to find hot discussions and popular stories

There’s a new option menu for finding all of the most popular stories and hot discussions. There’s Popular Today, Popular Week, Popular Month, Rising Fast and Hot Discussions.

Make the socialmedian site more publicly available

SocialMedian has opened up just about every page so that they can be crawled by search engines. They also listened to their users who wanted to be able to expose links to their own pages on SocialMedian, which enables anyone to have their own version of the Drudge Report.

Other changes and future plans

They’ve made the site more publicly available by removing registration walls on SocialMedian pages. People will now be able to navigate throughout the entire site and all external links without having to register on the site unless they want to take advantage of personalization features, clip a story, add a comment, etc.

Conclusion

SocialMedian might not be everyone’s cup of tea because it does require more input and just plain work than most sites these days. However, these new changes will make SocialMedian very attractive to those who love sharing news and information, especially bloggers. It’s like Digg, Google Reader and FriendFeed all mashed up together.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social News
SocialMedian is Raising $500,000 … In 140 Characters or Less
socialmedian: The Latest Social News Aggregator [Invites]
SocialMedian Tweaks Site with New Beta Features [Invites]
Alpha: When Beta Is Not Good Enough
GeoTwitterous: Personalized Twitter on a Map
Brabblr Updates Your Twitter, et al.

Location-based advertising? You’ve seen that, right? Practically every other ad you see on the net is tied to your general location, which is derived from your IP address.

Eventful, however, is a local events site, which means that the ads on it - now delivered by Placecast, described as “the world’s largest place-based interactive media company” - will truly be local, pinpointing your exact position. Here’s the example provided by Eventful:

“A user checking Eventful’s site for the next Coldplay concert in New York City would see an ad for Scion with the address and link to the closest Scion dealership, while a user looking for outdoor activities in San Francisco would see a localized ad for Subaru.”

Now, I’m not a particularly big fan of ads (who is), but this type of advertising might actually be useful every now and then. How do they do it? A combination of user-entered ZIP codes, content taken from Eventful and GPS for mobiles who have it, for example iPhone or Nokia N96.

Placecast has been integrated across Eventful’s entire online advertising inventory and email programs, and it delivers all kinds of ads (text links, Flash, images, video, audio) on any connected device, such as a laptop or a mobile phone.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Twitter Interface for Eventful: Fact of Fool?
Eventful Launches Facebook App for Bringing Artists to Your City
Eventful MySpace App: Tell Your Aritsts Where You Want Them to Go
Eventful Working with Presidential Campaigns in Grassroot Efforts
Eventful Hosting Energizer Encore Competition for Third Straight Year
Eventful Demands $7.5 Million - and Gets It
Planypus to Launch Social Site for Event Planning

Microsoft’s online collaboration space for Office users, where they can store, exchange and share their documents, now has one million users. We went through the most interesting features of Office Live Workspace when the beta opened up to everyone, and it is a solid effort. Its biggest advantage is the fact that it integrates into new Office products, which means that it’s very easy for Office users to start using it.

This milestone is an opportunity for Microsoft to bless us with some marketingese. “The pace at which people are signing up for the beta tells us that they are looking for ways to resolve the complexities of their work, school and home projects through a range of choices,” said Kirk Gregersen, director of consumer and small-business product management for Microsoft Office.

But, it’s also a good reminder of how easy is to underestimate Microsoft when it comes to online applications. Sure, Microsoft might seem dwarfed by Google when it comes to search and many other online markets. But Microsoft has an immense user base which can easily be leveraged to push other products, online or offline, and if they get it right, they can easily overshadow many, if not all, opponents in a market.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Coming Soon
Screenshots: Microsoft Office Live Workspace
Live Documents Looks Exactly Like Office
Microsoft Testing Live Office in Limited Beta
Microsoft Launches Expanded Language Support For Office Live Workspace
Fotolia Offers Free Images on Microsoft Office to Lure New Customers
Live Documents, A Microsoft Office Killer?

There’s an interesting meme that was picked up by Duncan Riley over at the Inquisitr earlier this evening with regard to the effect of FriendFeed on traditional blogging. It’s an interesting meme and something I’ve been spending a not insignificant amount of time thinking about myself.

 I’m in the midst of writing a long series of long posts for my personal blog on journalism with relationship to New Media, and I’m currently working on the subject of micro-blogging, and it’s role in the new and evolving ecosystem of for-profit online journalism.

That’s why I’ve paid special attention to blog posts like the one Hematopoiesis put out this evening that say stuff like “FriendFeed is killing blogging.” Duncan Riley disagreed that what Hematopoiesis argued was the case. I can see merits to both sides, and if you widen up the lens you look at the question with, you can see definite merit in both sides, plus some very interesting context.

Low-Impact Blogging? What’s that?
A few days ago, I wrote a fairly controversial article called 4 Questions for Early Adopters.  In the piece, I suggested a method for selling fringe concepts like “status microblogging” services Twitter and FriendFeed as something I termed “low-impact blogging.”  That term is sort of the basis on how I see these services evolving into the mainstream.

It certainly isn’t the only very clear path to mainstream, as Plaxo’s union with Comcast and all the cross-overs that entails with physical objects that the cable company is putting in people’s homes certainly qualifies for mainstream lifestreaming. But from an Internet user’s perspective, there is very little else that is universally familiar like the concept of blogging, thanks to social networks like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook giving everyone a blogging platform with their socnet account.

Going back to the term, though, I see most of the folks who’ve taken up Twitter, FriendFeed, and other similar services drasticly decrease posting volume, but not to the expense of their substantive editorial or news based posts, it seems. A lot of the personal updates, questions to incite discussion and the observational posts shorten themselves and end up on the lifestream.

Certainly, to some, this can be seen as “killing blogging,” as for many of us (myself included), personal diaries and journals were how we got started in blogging. If that’s all you blog about, you could very easily see these services as something that’ll completely eclipse the medium.

FriendFeed, Drop.io, Twitter and Utterz as a Meta-Platforms
Something I’ve done with my personal website is to not just embed various lifestreaming and micro-blogging widgets on the site, but made a valiant effort to actually incorporate the output of these sites as part of the featured content.

Each item not only features the original content (or an inline frame referencing the original content), but the subsequent discussion about the content, making it actual inline (and monetizable) content for my site.  Each discussion has a form at the bottom allowing site visitors (who have FriendFeed accounts) to participate in the discussion as they would on a blog post.

Even more promising is how usage and implimentation are the sites Utterz and Drop.io. Utterz is technically in the same space as FriendFeed and Twitter, though they’ve been around much longer (in fact, up until about April of this year, most traffic monitoring sources like Alexa and Compete ranked them very close to FriendFeed). Instead of going the route of syphoning off conversation from the blogosphere, their strategy was to inject it back in.

Utterz and Drop.io add an extra twist…
With Utterz, you have the ability to post video, audio or text, and all posts are accompanied by an option to cross post it back to your blogging or distribution platform of choice. Utterz has a pleathora of mobile posting options and an open API that functions almost identically to the Twitter and FriendFeed API (which is sure to lead to the inclusion of the service in tools like Twhirl or other microblogging stand-alone apps), and has the potential to completely eliminate the need to ever hit your blog or podcast interface.

It’s an interesting spin and convergence of micro-blogging, chat, blogging and podcasting. Drop.io, I learned today, is also evolving in its usage, to a similar utility.  It isn’t tied into blogging platforms or syphoning off discussion from existing blogs like FriendFeed, but creating a new way to seamlessly build media. FriendFeed user Nathan Rein described today the way he’s using it to effortlessly generate podcasts and teaching materials for his students:

Trying drop.io as an informal teaching journal. Set up a drop, and after each class, quickly phone-in notes and it becomes a podcast. This is even less fuss [than creating podcasts with Utterz], and it’s a little more “private” in a way. At the moment I am (unless I’m mistaken) the only person listening to my “dropcast,” and since it basically consists of notes for my own use that I want to keep in the cloud, no one else is likely to be interested in it. Thus a storage paradigm makes more sense than a blogging paradigm in this case.

Web 2.0 Apps are the New Distribution Tools
Ultimately, most of this new media not being funneled into blogging is going to end up in the same places, but the means to create, distribute, and garner discussion on the media will be done with tools that better suit the process.

FriendFeed is superb at creating spur-of-the-moment discussions from a wide cross-section of folks on interesting ideas, blog posts, and bookmarked news items. Twitter, from a content producer’s perspective, is a great research tool, and an even better way to market your media to folks who really care. Utterz is an excellent central meta-distribution platform. Drop.io, like Utterz, is also good at giving producers on the go a way to effortlessly build their media for slightly different applications.

In the end, most of this stuff can and will end up on the websites we’ve built originally to showcase our blog content, and the majority of it all ends up in an RSS feed at multiple points along the way.

In short, micro-blogging isn’t killing traditional blogging, it’s evolving it.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Mashable Rocks: Connect with us on FriendFeed
FriendFeed Launches Search
FriendFeed Recommendations? Who Are You Likely to Like?
FriendFeed Gets $5M, Launches to the Public
Former Googlers Team Up to Launch FriendFeed
FriendFeed Brings Twitter Back
FriendFeed Launches Rooms. Moving Towards Semantic Web?

Raptr is a new video game community launching this evening that aggregates users’ activities across desktop, Web, and console platforms. The end-result is a Friendfeed-like community of activity streams letting you know what games your friends are playing and how they’re performing on everything from Xbox Live to Facebook. Beyond that, social networking features and recommendation tools provide an interesting way to discover new games based on what your friends and other gamers around the world are playing.

It’s the type of application that makes me yearn for the days when I could play video games for the better part of every waking hour. But, I digress. Here are the features that make Raptr a pretty cool new site for highly active gamers:

Aggregation

At the core of Raptr is aggregating activities across gaming platforms: PC, Mac, Xbox 360/Xbox Live, Wii, Playstation 3, and even Facebook. Playing Madden ’09 on Xbox Live? That is broadcast to your Raptr feed. Hit a note streak in Guitar Hero? That’ll show up too. Essentially, Raptr is looking to take just about every activity they can from the games you play and broadcast it in Friendfeed style, both on the site and to external services like Twitter and your Facebook status. To get started, you simply add your various accounts for the games you play and Raptr will automatically crawl them automatically, much in the way that Friendfeed does.

Social Networking

Once you’ve signed up for Raptr and make some friends, the experience is much like that of Friendfeed with a few extras thrown in. You can login and see what games your friends are playing, or view the latest activities of the Raptr community on the whole. Additionally, there is a very Facebook-like chat feature where you can see who is currently logged in and send them messages and check out what games they own. There is a client version of this chat too that offers some bonus features, including the very handy automatic updates it will download for your PC games.

Discovery

While there is inherently a lot of new game discovery on Raptr by seeing what your friends and others are playing, a few additional features make the site a portal for finding new games – and even provide Raptr with a bit of a business model. Raptr analyzes what your friends are playing and makes recommendations, so, for example, if the site noticed that 10 of your friends have recently played World of Warcraft, it will recommend that game to you.

Meanwhile, if Raptr knows you play NCAA Football ’09, they’ll shoot you a trailer for NCAA Football ’10 as soon as it’s available, with EA paying for the privilege. Each video game on the site also has its own page, where you can see the recent users who have played it and even see an analysis of what time of day people typically play so you can best schedule your gaming (assuming you have absolutely no other priorities in life).

The Holy Grail of Gaming?

I’m a few years removed from being an active gamer, but Raptr has really done a fantastic job of incorporating some of the current de facto social networking features in an environment that makes sense for its demographic. Additionally, the company has a strong pedigree; Raptr is founded by gaming legend Dennis Fong who also co-founded Xfire and sold it to Viacom in 2006, while other top execs hail from a variety of gaming startups that have had lucrative exits. The company has raised $12 million from Accel Partners and Founders Fund.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

YoYo Games Is a User-Generated Gaming Community
Vigster Sets Out to Become IMDB for Video Games
Playyoo’s Mobile Gaming Community Launches with Contest for Developers
Web 2.0 Invites for April 14th, 2008
WeeWar is a Game Community
ClipShack: The Flickr of Video, Again!
Wikia & Playxpert Offer In-Game Wiki Widget

After I read Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins’ post on Mashable last night about how Google’s Chrome is not a Windows killer something about the post starting to get my thoughts going but I couldn’t really put them into words at that point. Then I read a post today by Jackson West on Valleywag where he said

Mainframe terminals, or keyboards and monitors attached to a big piece of iron in a subbasement somewhere, probably built by IBM or DEC. While proponents of what until recently was called server-side computing have now opted for the friendly-sounding “cloud computing” moniker

At this point a couple things solidified for me and regardless of how much the Web 2.0 bunch might like to think that they have invented something new with this whole cloud computing thing the fact is that this isn’t anything new at all. While most of the javascript jockeys might like to think that this cloud computing is so cool and a product of the Social Media Web 2.0 generation the reality is, that in one form or another we have had something like this since before the time of Bill Gates’ speech pointed to by Mark yesterday.

From the first time that someone dialed into a mainframe hidden in some clean room somewhere to when the first web application connected to Amazon’s S3 service we have been using remote dump sites for storing our data or running software. I still remember when Sun proclaimed that the thick client was dead and everyone would be moving to a thin client architecture and run all their software from a central server.

It wasn’t long though before that whole thin client idea went the way of the dodo bird. Except it really didn’t because we see the same idea now with everyone pumping out the PR swill about the great benefits of cloud computing.

Funnily enough I am writing this post out using Google Docs and will then copy it over to the back end online editor at Mashable’s blog site; which is actually hosted nowhere near any place that might be called their office. Google Docs of course is that company’s interpretation of what software from the cloud will be like; just as Microsoft has their own interpretation with Office Online.

Everyone is wanting to get us all excited about data portability and global access to their data (which in and of itself is a great idea). It was also a great idea when some programmer remotely compiled a program on some gigantic DEC or IBM server; they were at that point were leased from the big computer manufactures and the company paid for their time using it. It was also a great idea when a worker in a cubicle could access a document on a co-worker’s machine a floor or half a world away.

The value of the idea has never changed in all these years - only the delivery method has. Now, as we float through the haze of the warm and fuzzy goodness of cloud computing the reasons for doing this aren’t the same. At one time; especially during the height of the client/server ideology, it was about making it easier for the workers to access their data. Now, it is all about companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other cloud computing platform providers find new ways to lock their customers in and make a fortune doing so.

Sure, much of the cloud computing service available at this point is free for us to use after all free makes it so much easier to get people willing to use the services. It is like the drug dealer though, with their “the first hit is free” cloud computing providers know that once they have you locked in and have your data there aren’t any other alternatives.

Companies the size of Google, Microsoft and Amazon don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts - everything boils down at some time to a profitable bottom line. They might be willing to give up short term profits but you can be guaranteed that at some point someone is going going to have to start paying for these services. Advertising is simply not going to be able to cover the immense costs of these clouds.

As it is, Microsoft and Google are forking out hundreds of millions of dollars per data center with more and more coming online all the time - someone is going to have to start paying for all of this. Where once companies like IBM and DEC held companies ransom over just the plain access to giant mainframes we now have equally huge companies holding open the gates to their clouds.

The simple fact is that at this point they are the one’s with the keys to our data not us which makes them; or cloud computing, no different than what we had some twenty plus years ago.

It’s the same greedy pigs just with a new coat of make up - there is no real difference when you come to the basic principals of the whole idea. One generation’s client/server is another generation’s cloud computing.

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peek Available
Ideablob is a Place to Grow Your Ideas
MySpace Community To Coauthor Environmetal Handbook
CollabAndRate Offers Suggestion Box for Companies
Starbucks’ Bright Idea: Launch a Social Network.
Facebook Will Not Sign NDAs for fbFund
Salesforce to Launch Community Platform for Clients

I’m sorry, I can’t help it - I’m a sucker for mashups. Which is why I have to bring the latest one to your attention: Tumbltape.

It’s exactly how it sounds: a Muxtape for Tumblr. Just when you thought Muxtape was gone for good, it has inspired John Zanussi and Adam Gotterer to catch on the music sharing wave and create Tumbltape, which takes the latest songs (aka - audio files) from each user’s tumblelog and creates a playlist.

When new songs are added, your Tumbltape playlist is automatically updated. Plus, you can choose to let Tumbltape figure out the artist and track names based on the text from your post, or you can type in the artists and track titles yourself. Simple as that.

Secretly I am wondering how long this will last, but if the Tumblr community loves it and Muxtape users pick up on the service it will certainly be hard to shut down, at least until the RIAA finds out about it.

Have you been wondering how many rooms on FriendFeed are private? Do you know how many active and public users there are? Are you curious as to whether people “comment” or “like” more?

Do you even care?

For those people who have fallen head over heels for FriendFeed and have been searching for a way to see “what’s popular,” I introduce to you FFHolic. The site, which just launched yesterday, is a place where FriendFeed fanatics can check out what the latest buzz is.

Visitors can search through ‘most liked entries and videos,’ ‘most commented entries and videos,’ and ‘most popular users.’ The idea seems to be taken blatantly from Twitterholic, but unlike its “light” rival FFHolic provides more than just lists of names. It gives insight to popular trends on the rapidly growing social network and serves as a makeshift database for statistics on usage.

The site itself is pretty raw at this point — still in Beta stage — and there’s not much to look at. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if it improves and becomes the natural meeting site for FriendFeedaholics Anonymous.

Here is a peek at the latest FriendFeed commentary around