Not everyone loves FriendFeed - its social media firehouse qualities can lead to a lot of noise which can certainly be overwhelming to newcomers. However, even those who don't participate on the service may see the value of a lifestream. By hosting your own lifestream, you can easily share your current activities from across the social web with your web site's visitors. Once set up, it's somewhat like a passive form of a Tumblr blog. You continue your usual activities - upload photos to flickr, favorite videos on YouTube, bookmark pages on del.icio.us - and your web site will reflect those changes.

One of the newest applications that provides a hosted lifestream is Sweetcron. This app automatically updates with your latest activities, but unlike a FriendFeed account, this lifestream is completely customizable by editing its template. It's also self-hosted. Much in the way that WordPress can be self-hosted on your own server, so can Sweetcron. But the biggest difference is that Sweetcron is 100% open source. Developers can write their own php classes to extend the Sweetcron software.

Sweetcron was designed by Yongfook, a freelance web producer based in Tokyo. You can see an example of what Sweetcron looks like on his blog:

<img src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/sweetcron.png"A Sweetcron Lifestream

Back in April, Mark Krynsky interviewed Yongfook to get some more details about the service. He learned that Sweetcron will require php5 and MySQL5 and items are stored in the database so people can page through the stream and perform searches. You'll also be able to remove items from the stream via Sweetcron's GUI. However, the big difference between Sweetcron and WordPress is that it will not support hot-swappable themes. Instead, you will use the GUI to make your changes - like adding text, selecting colors, or pasting in your own CSS. Beyond that, you'll need to edit the templates directly.

At the time, Yongfook said Sweetcron would be available in June, but the web site still shows that's it's an email waiting list. Yongfook's blog states "Don't bug me about Sweetcron. I'll launch it soon. Promise"...so we won't bug him, but we are excited.

Microsoft. Depending on who you are, their name alone elicits some pretty strong feelings. Some people love them, others love to hate them. Few people are neutral. However, everyone can pretty much agree that Microsoft has been fighting an image problem lately and one that has started to make them look less like a towering giant and more like the underdog. Those "I'm a Mac" ads didn't help, either. However, some recent innovations make us wonder if the tide is starting to turn for the big blue monster.

Earlier this year, we wondered if the Microsoft was beginning to wake up from an apparent slumber. That post addressed cloud databases and IE8, but perhaps those won't be the turning points for Microsoft's image after all. In fact, given the number of happy Firefox customers, IE8 may still be somewhat of an uphill battle. But some other innovations prove that even Microsoft can still be cool.

Netflix Comes To Xbox

Earlier this week, Netflix subscribers got a nice surprise - they no longer need to save up for that Roku box to get instant access to Netflix movies on their TV. Instead, the new set-top box for Netflix is going to be one that many people already have in their living rooms: an Xbox 360. The partnership between Xbox and Netflix will be bringing a new "Watch Instantly" feature that will appear on Xbox later this fall. In addition, a "Live Party" feature will allow people to watch movies together over Xbox Live. Well, the coolness of that feature is debatable...but still, Netflix on Xbox? Did Microsoft just win the living room from Apple?

Deep Zoom Changes the Web

Bah humbug - another browser plugin. Is that what you think? Well, like it or not the Silverlight plugin is being pushed hard. It's going to be installed on millions of HP computers and it's going to power NBC's Olympics '08 website, so it's going to become hard to avoid installing this one after a while.

If you've been paying attention to Silverlight news, you know that one of the most remarkable things about it is its Deep Zoom feature. It's definitely the coolest. It initially received attention when Hard Rock debuted their Memorabilia website. Then there was the incredible Deep Earth site (which technically didn't use Silverlight's Deep Zoom, but instead uses Silverlight plus a custom-written component created in Visual Studio). Now we have a Silverlight Deep Zoomable image of Yosemite National Park. 70 photographers, GPS-enabled cameras, 10,000 high-res photos. The results let researchers study rockfall activity and help Yosemite search-and-rescue teams with their operations by providing detailed, zoomable maps of the rockfaces. Cool? Yes, definitely.

Live Mesh

This service is rapidly approaching coolness. Mac fans have complained there's no Mesh for them, but that's only a matter of time. In the past couple of days, we've seen Live Mesh open up to all and launch a mobile web site.

Via m.mesh.com you can see your stream of Mesh news, access your Meshified folders, and move your photos, videos, and other content from your mobile device into your Mesh, instantly making them accessible from any computer, anywhere. The Live Desktop (cloud storage) offers 5 GB, but you aren't limited to meshing only 5 GB - you can mesh as much as you want. Data will sync from device to device via P2P connections, but only 5 GB are stored online for access when you're away from a device you own. You have the option to configure which files are part of that 5 GBs. Oh, and it does Remote Desktop, too.

If you haven't been able to wrap your head around Mesh, yet, this video is a killer introduction. Here, Ori Amiga demos the native Mesh feeds, WPF applications using Mesh, a Silverlight client that supports working on and offline, a custom Facebook application that syncs Facebook photos with Live Mesh, and even a Mac client that sends photos to Live Mesh. Cool? You bet.

Ori Amiga: Programming the Mesh

Your guide to this video

• 10:53: Skip to this point to start seeing the best stuff
• 19:10(ish): The developer stuff continues until 19:10ish
• 19:40: WPF demo app Family Show
• 27:01: Silverlight App PhotoZoom running offline
• 33:08: Mesh connector for Twitter
• 34:35: Mesh connector for Facebook
• 36:45: Mesh running on the Mac - photo from Photobooth synced to Mesh almost instantaneously - to both PCs and mobile!
• 43:00: Opening/editing files directly from the cloud - the cloud will be a shortcut on your desktop
• 46:09: Viewing offline RSS feeds synced to Mesh in your RSS reader

Do these innovations change your opinion of Microsoft? Are you impressed, annoyed, neutral, upset, undecided? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Author Disclosure: I also blog for Microsoft's Channel 10. I'm not a Microsoft employee, just a technology fan. This is not a paid endorsement - these are personal opinions.

As mentioned earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb is partnering with a couple of conferences this year and one of them is DEMOfall 08, the long-running launchpad for startups. DEMOfall 08 is on September 7-9 in San Diego. They're just announced the sessions, including a "head-to-head" between tech reporters Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. The premise of their debate will be: what lies ahead for the Digital Age?

Another interesting panel is 'Where the Web is Going: Web 2.0, 3.0 and Beyond', moderated by Twine's Nova Spivack. Here's the description for that:

"Ask five different technologists to define the next phase of the Web and you will get five different answers. As we move beyond the community-driven focus of Web 2.0, the theories of what lies ahead are rampant and disparate. Will the next Internet revolution lie in semantic technologies or data portability? Search engines or user-generated content? Where does the enterprise fit? And how will big media adapt?"

So a couple of great sessions focused on the future of technology, which of course is right up our street.

ReadWriteWeb readers can receive a discount rate of $2,395 ($600 off the standard rate of $2,995 and $400 lower than the July early bird rate of $2795) by clicking here for registration.

Tapulous, the developers of the highly popular Tap Tap Revenge game for the iPhone and iPod touch, released a native, location aware Twitter client for the iPhone tonight. Twinkle (iTunes link) already existed as a native application on jail broken iPhones before, but Apple only added it to the official iTunes store tonight. While there are some oddities in the way Twinkle works, the location awareness makes it a worthwhile addition to the ever growing pool of Twitter clients.

Features

Twinkle is a very capable Twitter client in its own right, and while it isn't quite as fully featured as Twitterific, it does have some features Twitterific doesn't have, including the ability to follow new users right from the application.

Unlike Twitterific, though, Twinkle does not have a built-in browser, so clicking on a URL closes the application and takes you to Safari instead.

You can also attach a picture to your own messages, but doing so crashed my phone twice in a row before it finally worked. Once it worked, the picture was uploaded to Tapulous' Twinkle page and added to the tweet as a link shortened by snipurl. Twinkle users don't have to click on the URL, but can see the picture right in the application.

Location Aware, but for Twinkle Users Only

One limitation of Twinkle, however, is that it is only aware of other Twinkle users in your vicinity and does not display tweets from 'regular' Twitter users in the location aware part of the app. As such, the application will only become really useful once more people start using it as their default client.

One more Twinkle only feature is, strangely, your profile picture. For some reason, the location aware part of Twinkle does not display your regular Twitter profile picture. Instead, you have to set one specifically for Twinkle.

Verdict

Besides that the user interface could be a bit snappier at times, Twinkle is a very cool addition to the growing pool of iPhone Twitter clients. It's also a great way to discover local Twitter users you might not have been following yet.

The authors also clearly have a sense of humor: when Twitter fails to respond to its update requests, the app displays a little warning sign with a whale tail in it.

How would you feel if you spent more than $1 million throwing a party and less than 100 or even 1,000 people showed up? That sinking feeling is spreading over corporate boardrooms around the nation, according to study performed by Ed Moran, a director at consulting mega-firm Deloitte.

It may be all the rage, but are company-built social networks for customers to socialize in really smart?

According to Wall St. Journal coverage of Moran's study, "Thirty-five percent of the [corporate] online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members - despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects." That means some of those $1 million parties probably had less than 100 attendees. Somebody got fired for that, right?

Former RWW staff member Josh Catone found the WSJ story first over at his new gig and offers some good advice for companies seeking to avoid this terrible fate.

According to the study's author, the biggest problems are the following:

• Overpriced, shiny features.


• Insufficient and inexperienced community management. (See our massive post on community management earlier this week.)


• Bad metrics and criteria. Though Moran says most companies can talk the talk, saying they are looking for engagement and word of mouth, they end up measuring in page views. He says that's bad. It probably wouldn't be so bad if they were getting any page views.

Other Perspectives

The study was performed in conjunction with Beeline Labs and titled The Tribalization of Business. How bad do things really look? That depends on who you ask. Beeline's summary of findings don't sound so bad at all. A press release that appears to have originated from Deloitte looks a little more somber. The Wall St. Journal coverage focuses on absolute gloom and doom. The report itself? You'll have to request a copy and get in line, apparently. Look out, here comes the future!

Let's face it, though. Social networks where a brand name product is what everyone rallies around are a dumb idea. They are stupid. No one should submit themselves to the indignity of creating a user profile and friend connections based on cola or cat litter. We have written before about the never ending market for niche social networks and we're down with that. Hell, we like to read about countless niche social networks on the Ning Blog just for fun. If brand-centered social networks are failing, though, it's probably because they are brand heavy and stupid.

The matter could probably warrant more thoughtful discussion, but instead we'll leave you with this image, from Purina's Breeze for Cats. It's a "community" focused on cat litter. Ask yourself, is there hope for humanity?



Fake Smile photo by Lauren Photography

There have been various sightings of a new design for Twitter this afternoon, though by now, Twitter has reverted back to its old design. Possibly, Twitter is testing this new design as it prepares to integrate Summize's search into its current look. The new design moves the navigation bar away from the top and to the right side of the screen, making the overall look of the site more coherent and modern.

From what we were able to see in the short time the design was up, Twitter is mostly trying to streamline its interface with this new design - we did not spot any new features. The latest tweet a user made has been moved from the profile on the top right to directly underneath the text entry box. The 'reply' and 'favorite' shortcuts have been moved out of the interface and now only show when you hover over a message. The search box has also been moved and the empty space between the updates and the profile information on the right has been removed.

While the new design keeps the general feel of the old Twitter page, the new design is decisively more minimalist and clean. As Twitter is preparing to integrate Summize into its site, chances are that if they want to integrate Summize's real-time updates, they would also have to redesign their front-end to be able to display those updates.

Interestingly, the redesign looks exactly like the sketch Twitter used in its post about the Summize acquisition. Judging from this, the integration with Summize might already be quite far along.

Today online music service last.fm released the new design they've been working on since May. At first glance it looks quite different to the Facebook-like UI that we saw in the beta in June. However as we noted in our review of the beta last month, the beta UI was much criticized - so the fresh lick of paint is probably due to that user feedback (and, as you can see in the screenshot below, the new header literally looks like a lick of paint!).

The launch today was disrupted by server issues, but as of witing the service is running smoothly. The main changes are a fully visible library, more comprehensive Last.fm music profile, iPod / media player sync, real-time charts, "instant recommendations", activity feeds, a new music player, improved sharing, and podcasts. Also an iPhone app was launched earlier this week.

As noted in our previous review, last.fm has had many navigation issues in the past. The new design is supposedly simpler, but the navigation issues aren't completely resolved - for example now a drop-down list has been added to the top right, but I'm not sure that's going to be intuitive enough for many users. Still, the new navigation is an improvement on the old one. Although it couldn't be much worse, in all honesty.

Here's a quick visual look at the evolution of last.fm's new design:

Current (new) design - the 'Lick of paint' design

Beta design circa June 08 - the 'Facebook design'

Old design

A reminder that last.fm is an online music service, which can be enjoyed via a desktop software app or within the browser. Last.fm is built on top of a very impressive music recommendation database called AudioScrobbler. See our February '08 post about last.fm for full details on how last.fm works.

Also last.fm recently released a new version of their public API, which allows any application or device to achieve deep integration with the Last.fm platform. Perhaps this is one of the reasons behind media player VLC's new support of last.fm, announced today too. Overall, it appears that the now CBS-owned online music service is keeping pace in the fast-moving web 2.0 world. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter's downtime, but also as a representation of the community's love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter's troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale "over capacity" image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. This is the story of the Fail Whale.

Fail Whale's Beginnings

You probably thought that Twitter was using designs they paid for, right? Well, apparently that was not the case. The designer behind the Fail Whale, Yiying Lu, had posted the image to the stock photo web site, iStockPhoto. (She has now removed the original link). Although the image of the Fail Whale was widely known, the designer herself was not. Tom Limongello decided to change that.

Tom had once made himself a Fail Whale t-shirt from a screenshot which he wore at a Mashable party. Of course, the shirt was a huge hit. But Tom couldn't really post the shirts for sale because he didn't have rights to the design. Yet, here was an entire community of Fail Whale fans - many of which who had gathered at failwhale.com - who wanted a shirt of their own.

But then Tom met the designed Yiying Lu when her iStockPhoto link was tweeted to the @FailWhale Twitter user from Twitterer @emmastory. The Fail Whale project (@FailWhale, failwhale.com) is a community effort created by Sean O'Steen, (@seanostee) whose mission was to create a brand from the Fail Whale phenomenon. Sean is responsible for the Fail Whale web site and the Twitter profile.

Setting Up The Fail Whale Store

Despite the popularity of the Fail Whale, creator Yiying Lu wasn't really profiting from her iconic work. Twitter.com did not link to her and she didn't have an online store for Twitter fans. So Tom took it upon himself to give her a call. He told Yiying, who lives in Australia, but is originally from Shanghai, about the project, the community's desire for merchandise, and the Fail Whale's potential, and asked her to create a Zazzle store so everyone could enjoy her work.

And thus the Fail Whale online store was born. On zazzle.com/failwhale, fans can now customize their own shirt with their own handle and slogan. Now, not only could Fail Whale fans buy the shirt, they were also helping to support the artist, too.

FailWhale Zazzle Shop

Spreading the News: Fail Whale Has Arrived!

The next question the Fail Whale community wanted to address was getting the word out about the Zazzle shop. Tom had originally wanted to send shirts to the team at Twitter as gesture of community support, and he now also realized that the gesture could also be a way to promote the artist herself and her new shop.

So, the Fail Whale fan club rallied together to round up the $361.17 needed to purchase 20 shirts and have them shipped to Twitter's offices. Also included with the shirts was a note from Tom and the gang which offered a message of support to the Twitter team and also a request to tweet a thank you to Yiying which included the link to the Zazzle store.

Twitter's Evan Williams did end up tweeting about the shirts shortly after their arrival. Though he wasn't sure how to react (tweeted: "mixed feelings"), he did include the link to the online store. Tom equates this tweet to a media buy...at a $25.06 CPM. Of course when you take into account the re-tweets and the other subsequent Twitter messages linking to the online store, the effective CPM goes down quite a bit.

Ev's Tweet

Fail Whale Fan Club

The Fail Whale fan club at failwhale.com now actively promotes the Zazzle store as well as the additional shop that Yiying Lu opened up for t-shirts and accessories at failwhaleshop.com. The Zazzle shop has made around $4200.00 from the 12,000+ visits they've received since June 25th. The fan club also runs a Facebook group that currently has 3154 fans.

But the number of sales made is only one aspect to this story - what's more compelling is the torrent of social media cooperation that Ev's tweet set off. Since then, Tom, Sean, and Yiying have continued to manage the Fail Whale community across the numerous social sites, making new friends, starring their favorite fan photos, and interacting with those who post to the Facebook fan page wall. Sean even extended the Fail Whale concept to TUAW recently which showed the Apple iPhone similarly being carried by Yiying Lu's birds during the low point of iPhone 3g activation issues last Friday night.

Fail iPhone

The Birth of a Social Media Object

It's also notable that this social media effort has gone the opposite route as what has been seen with another iconic brand: Hello Kitty. The fans of that brand have literally stolen the image to make fan art, claiming that Hello Kitty is now part of our pop culture. Normally, the internet encourages this type of piracy, but in the case of the Fail Whale, by promoting the artist, the designer's identity and official link have floated to the top.

The Fail Whale story is one that shows the value of open content. By making the art available, Yiying is now going to profit in more ways than if she had simply made the art available for purchase. She will be earning profits from merchandise at both shops and from the sale of her prints and she will certainly win some future design work from this as well. Of course, her successes come from more than just the work itself, but also from the power of the community who embraced it. The marriage of the two breathed life into the art and created a modern-day social object which emanates the hope of the community and the love they have for the brand.

You can see more of Yiyang's work on her personal site, yiyinglu.com.

Traffic analytics company Hitwise released search market share numbers for dating websites in June today and two things were striking about the data.

Ad supported free site PlentyOfFish is trouncing everyone in the dating game and huge numbers of mainstream users are still afraid to navigate there directly using their browser's address bar. The economics of user ignorance are serious and could have big implications for online innovation.

More than 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were URLs (match.com, plentyoffish.com) and almost all of the queries were something that .com could have been added to for direct navigation. If mainstream users learned to navigate using the address bar instead of the search bar - what would happen to the search economy and innovation online?

What is Wrong With People?

How many times have you seen someone enter a URL in the wrong field of their browser? Apparently it happens a whole lot, over and over again, all day long, all around the world.

Those users end up being shown links other than the place they want to go, including sponsored ads, competing sites and related sites sometimes with confusing URLs. Many of the top dating sites are buying AdWords links to their own sites in searches for their own URLs. How much are the search engines making from user click throughs of Match.com AdWords when users search for Match.com, even though Match.com is the top natural search result as well?

Oddly, no one appears to have bought ads for the search term plentyoffish.com on Google, though Hitwise seems to suggest that would be a good idea. We won't claim to understand AdWords enough to explain why there aren't ads there now - perhaps a reader can do so.

Web 2.0? Uh...

While we're all excited about the Read-Write Web, filled with empowered user contributors and thrilling new web applications - a huge number of people online don't know the difference between their browser's address bar and search bar. Let's keep that in perspective.

What will it take for them to learn? Do the browser providers and search engines want them to? They've got a clear financial stake in that not happening.

In fact, countless parties online probably do. If mainstream users learned how to use the internet, it could be devastating for an online economy based on monetizing their ignorance. Everyone knows that's true for spammers and phishers, but the numbers indicate that there are a whole lot more people than that who are dependent on user ignorance. Luckily for them, there's plenty of it to go around.

If more savvy users are less likely to click on ads, what does that mean for website usability and user education? Will an explosive future of smart users creating content online and using the web's powerful features be limited by the financial interests of the companies providing online services? We think that's probably already happening and it's a real shame.

Amazon's original video store, Amazon Unbox, is a lot like iTunes - you shop online and the files must be downloaded to your computer in order to view them. For many people, the service wasn't worth the effort. After downloading the large files, they could only be watched in Amazon's proprietary media player which restricted their use. It wasn't until a partnership with Tivo was announced that the service gained popularity, but even still, it lags behind iTunes. Now, Amazon is taking another shot at the video marketplace - this time with a streaming service instead. Will this be the winning ticket?

Our digital lifestyle blog, last100, has an analysis of this news.</p

Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog

With the gradual roll out of Amazon's new video service, starting today, the company hopes to have fixed everything that was holding back adoption of its original "UnBox" video download store.

Gone are the lengthy downloads or the need to install special software, and instead, "Amazon On Demand" utilizes streaming so that content begins playing almost immediately all within a standard web browser. Additionally, the relaunched service is now Windows and Mac-friendly, and will also be available through Internet-connect televisions, starting with Sony Bravia TVs that are compatible with the company's rather costly Bravia Internet Video Link device.

"For the first time, this is drop dead simple," Bill Carr, Amazon's vice president for digital media, tells the New York Times. "Our goal is to create an immersive experience where people can't help but get caught up in how exciting it is to simply watch a movie right from Amazon.com with a click of the button." Around 40,000 television episodes and movies are available, both rental and to-own, with the same pricing scheme as the original UnBox. Television episodes cost $1.99, movies range from $7.99 to $14.99, and movie rentals cost $3.99. Almost all of the big studios and television networks are on board, with the exception of Disney, where Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder. (We're seeing a pattern here: Disney also snubbed Sony's new video download store, launched earlier this week.)

Cloud television

Not only is Amazon utilizing streaming in order to deliver "instant" playback but it also means that content doesn't have to be permanently stored on a user's hard drive. As a result, Amazon is able to offer another potential benefit to customers: a virtual video library of previously purchased content, stored in the 'cloud' (on the company's own servers) ready to be streamed as many times and to as many compatible devices as the user has access to. While this will initially consist of PCs running Mac OSX or Windows, along with select TVs from Sony, in the future this could extend to many different devices, either through specific partnerships like the one currently forged with Sony, or by utilizing browser-based standards or any other technology or protocol Amazon chooses to support.

"Our goal is to continue to establish partnerships with all companies who have a connected device" says Carr. "Creating this on-demand available-everywhere access to premium content is going to be very attractive to consumers."

Also see: Amazon in your living room: today and in the future

Additionally, since content isn't stored permanently on a user's hard drive, the studios' concerns about piracy is less of an issue. And for consumers, the inconvenience caused by the use of copy-protection technology in the form of DRM becomes much less apparent.

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