Today we’d like to announce our second public project, FeedStats. FeedStats exists for the purpose of visualizing FriendFeed users’ data to see how they interact not only with the service, but with other users. It’s a quick way to find what services they’re using, when they post, and who interacts with their content the most.

Inspiration for the project came from a popular (and similar) utility for Twitter called TweetStats. We liked their service enough that we’ve modeled ours after their high standards. Though we’re apples to their oranges, we feel that we owe quite a bit to Damon for inspiring us to build FeedStats.

Integration with FriendFeed

One of the coolest things about FeedStats – aside from the awesome data visualization – is that you can interact directly with FriendFeed using your account. You may choose to use our site completely without signing in, but you’ll miss out on some cool features. Once you authenticate yourself to us, we’ll use your account to perform functions like one-click following of other users you stumble upon on our site. Though it’s the only feature right now that requires authentication, there might be more in the future. Rest assured that your credentials are safe and we take privacy seriously.

Graphs You’ll Find Useful

All the information we use is collected directly from the FriendFeed API using publicly available methods. If you do have a private account, we won’t be able to process your stats at this time.

For all the public users, we chart the services you use (in bar and pie charts), how many posts you make each day of the week, how many posts you make each hour of the day, and who likes and comments on your content the most. The final, and possibly most useful, chart we build is called the Like Compatibility Index.

The Like Compatibility Index is generated by looking at posts you’ve liked recently and seeing who else has liked them. We’ll tally up the users with whom you have the most likes in common and give you the option to follow them or view their stats or profile. The Like Compatibility Index is great for finding other users who have similar interests as you.

Like Compatibility Index Chart & Top 10

Screenshots

Services that have posted to FriendFeed

Services that aren't Twitter that have posted to FriendFeed

User Profile on FeedStats

Nambu is another player in the multi-service social network client pool. It’s a native Mac application that requires Leopard to run. At first glance, Nambu is a mix of EventBox, TweetDeck, and Twhirl.

Nambu in Multi-Column View

Nambu uses tr.im and pic.im for URLs and images (all are developed by the same people). If you haven’t used pic.im, it’s a very simple service similar to TwitPic.

The Good

• The current beta release of Nambu only supports Twitter, though ultimately it will also support FriendFeed, Identi.ca/Laconica and Ping.fm. The feedback forums also suggest that Facebook integration will be a top priority.
• Replies to a tweet can be embedded directly below it. It’s a good idea but I feel that it disrupts the flow when you read the reply, scroll up, and read it again.
• There are multiple views which should work for everyone. There’s your plain-jane single column combined view (all updates in one column), a sidebar view which puts a menu of possible views to the left of a single column, and multi-column view which puts any number of columns next to each other.
• Inside of any column you can filter updates. It’s not terribly sophisticated but if you’re looking for mentions of a term, it’ll do fine.
• There’s an option to mark all as read, remove just the updates you’ve seen, or remove all regardless of whether or not you’ve seen them. This makes it easy to limit the number of updates displayed so you’re not inundated with a ton of info.
• Keyboard Shortcuts – ’nuff said. Well… there are some global shortcuts and some service specific shortcuts. Compose, reload, hide all, translate, reply, retweet and private message are some of the more useful shortcuts.
• Shortened URLs are decompressed and show just the domain of the destination. It looks weird at first but if you hover over any link it’ll show you the short URL and the full destination URL. This is going to take a lot of the fun out of Rick Rolls.
• It’s pretty. The interface is colorful and vibrant just like Twhirl is. My biggest gripe for TweetDeck is that every column looks the same. With Nambu, you’ll find some variation (albeit limited) in colors.
• You can group your contacts. Group management is a bit of a pain – you have to use the right-click/context menu to add a person to a group or select them from a huge list of all your contacts. Unfortunately when you’re using the list, you have to remember their name because it displays that instead of their screen name. Luckily if you have a general idea you can use the search box. Srsly – when will someone implement a drag-and-drop solution for group management??
• Persistent search – performs just like you expect it to
• A feature I haven’t seen elsewhere is a view for all links either sent or received. I’m not entirely sure when I’d use this but it’s still pretty cool.
• There’s a count on the dock icon of how many unread items you have. If you change the badge count to just the items directed at you, it easier to ignore Twitter.
• Growl support, which is pretty much expected for a Mac app.

The Bad

• The preview version is limited only to Twitter
• Looking up profiles is a pain. You have to find an update from that person in order to get to their profile peek. There’s no way to type in their name and view their profile. I really hope this changes, and fast.
• There’s no way to view a tweet’s parent. Good luck following a conversation backwards.
• Multiple account support at the expense of having them update at all times. You can turn it down to update every 15 minutes but I’d like to just shut off updates for an account. This lets me tweet from multiple accounts without using API calls for it. (Useful for monitoring search results)
• The columns are locked in place. If you want to move a column left or right, you have to close the column and then reopen them in the order you want them. This needs to be fixed ASAP.
• When closing a search results column in multi-column view, it doesn’t truly go away. It just spins in the background and bloats your unread count. I was totally confused why I had hundreds of unread messages after marking all as read.
• When new tweets arrive, the column shifts, making you lose your place.

The Verdict

Even though Nambu is in beta, it’s worth checking out and using for at least a day to see how you like it. It can be a little buggy but will be a solid contender with time. Some people are complaining of crashes but it’s only crashed once on me.

Things I Need

In order for me to want to use this all the time, I would need the following:

1. Customizable audio notifications so I hear audio for replies or DMs and better granularity for visual notifications.
2. Moving columns around. Drag and drop (ala Seesmic Desktop) would be great but I’d take the button option from TweetDeck.
3. Better profile lookup

Screenshots

Sidebar View

pretty good, all things considered (CPU, Threads, RAM)

While Twitter fans were waiting for the new integrated search bar to be rolled out to their profiles, Facebook fans are awaiting the new home page update to be applied. Facebook announced the beginning of the rollout for new home pages on March 9, but I just had mine updated on Friday (March 13).

Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith (@justinsmith) wrote up some first impressions of the new home page design, including a mention that “the stream emphasizes status updates, like Twitter.” Perhaps Facebook is still slightly bitter about Ev Williams and company turning down their buyout offer last November?

The look of the new home page feels very much like Twitter to me, mostly because they were one of (if not the) first to use the vertical stream of posts with an update box at the top.

However, the way content filters in and the options users have to take action looks much more like FriendFeed.

Even with a 33% growth in traffic over the past month, Twitter has a long ways to catch up to the number of users on Facebook (currently 175 million worldwide). As such, most people will probably see Twitter as “oh, like updating my status on Facebook”, rather than Facebook status updates looking like an expansion/copy of Twitter.

Although I personally use Twitter more than Facebook and FriendFeed combined, I wouldn’t mind seeing some in-line commenting, liking-functionality or ways to group users/content on Twitter that are already found on Facebook and FriendFeed.

Have you gotten the new Facebook home page layout? What are your thoughts so far? Are you updating statuses in both places?

Many people use FriendFeed as a firehose for multiple content sources. FriendFeed allows you to create a lifestream and subscribe to other users’ lifestreams. There’s a ton of really good content and functionality on FriendFeed, so it’s important that you’re watching it for mentions. But how do you do that? FriendDeck is one such tool that helps you in this case.

The Web Client

The easiest way to interact with FriendDeck is by using the web interface. Once you’re logged in, you can create search columns that allow you to monitor keywords, searches, users, friends, lists, rooms, specific services, and much more. There’s a dedicated help room to show you some tricks you can use to create columns.

The AIR Client

One of the sweetest features of FriendDeck is that the AIR client syncs your columns with the web interface. This allows you to choose your columns and take them anywhere you want. While it needs some work, it’s a good option for those who prefer AIR apps. There are some bugs being reported (see the FriendDeck room) such as time zones being off, the unlike option not working, and some case-sensitivity issues. These plague both the AIR and web clients.

Search Modifiers

Here’s a few options you can put in front of a search to modify what results you get back:

• friends:user – list of entries by a user’s friends
• room:room-name – list of entries for a room
• likes:user – list of user’s likes
• comments:user – list of user’s comments
• url:mylink – list of posts regarding mylink
• domain:mydomain – list of posts about a domain
• twitter:criteria – search Twitter for criteria
• who:user – list of posts by user
• list:favorites – list of posts in your favorites list
• say:message – send message to FriendFeed

What Else?

You can’t reply to other users’ updates and it’s cumbersome to send new messages. To me, that’s one of the biggest draws for FriendFeed. The app feels more like a read-only tool or a FriendFeed feed reader. ReadWriteWeb suggests building building private rooms to fill with blogs, sites, searches, etc and then subscribing to that room. This gives you a pretty sophisticated reader built on top of FriendFeed. The plus side is you can also use that from the FriendFeed UI.

FriendDeck is a complex application, so don’t feel bad if you feel like you’re lost or you don’t quite get it. Take some time and explore what it has to offer, and definitely check out the help room. Try the web interface first, then dive into the AIR app if you like it.

At the start of month, FriendFeed introduced publishing of FriendFeed entries to Twitter. While this is no amazing feat from a technical perspective, it is great to see this rolled up inside the FriendFeed package and not being handled by an outside web service. With this feature, unique content posted to FriendFeed (such as ‘comments’ and ‘likes’) or anything collected by FriendFeed can be easily shared with the Twitter community.

This feature can be found in the account page under Feed Publishing. Once enabled you will be prompted to enter your Twitter username and password and then a number of options are displayed including selecting the type of FriendFeed entries and posts from services to be published.

Setup is quick and provides the initial options I was looking for, however, I was surprised to find that Feed Publishing only includes promoting activity on Twitter. While I haven’t seen plans for the future of this functionality, I hope to see this built out for other microblogs and platforms, including my WordPress blog!

If you’re not on FriendFeed but are still looking to promote posts from other services to Twitter, you may want to check out http://www.twitterfeed.com.

This Tuesday, the eyes of the world will be focused on the U.S. election. Whatever the outcome, history will be made. There are a number of ways you can watch coverage of and participate in the election. First and foremost, you can vote and watch coverage on TV. But did you also know that there are options for following along with the election on your favorite microblogging platforms? No longer do you have to wait hours or days for the political pundits and bloggers to say their bit. Microblogging makes feedback on election day nearly instantaneous.

We’ve highlighted what we see as the main sources for microblogging election coverage:
(If you know of another good source, please leave a comment below).

socialmedian

This aggregation platform will be pulling in all kinds of media from Tweets to blog posts to Flickr photos. They’ll widgetize all the updates they find and feature them on websites such as washingtonpost.com, guardian.co.uk, and mediadeluge.com.

If you’re more interested in watching instead of participating, you can also view the entire socialmedian feed or filter it out by candidate or view a feed for the poll information. In Digg-like fashion, they support both popular news and the up-and-coming news.

Twitter

This component has been well-known and live for a while now, but Twitter has their own election center. The main feature of the center include a scrolling view of election-related tweets.

Twitter also allows you to filter tweets by presidential and vice presidential candidate, as well as view the latest tweet from the two main presidential candidates. There’s also an area where it shows the hot topics of the election.

FriendFeed

While it doesn’t really fall under the realm of microblogging, it does a great job of aggregating information from a wide array of sources, including microblogs. This looks to be limited to only those who are actually members of the room, which is currently only 10 people.

FriendFeed also only shows you a limited network of people, so it might actually be more pertinent to what your friends are saying rather than what everyone is saying.

TwitterVoteReport

A more proactive solution is TwitterVoteReport. This tool allows you to interface with Twitter in order to give aid and insight to other users who are having difficulty in voting. Some of the suggested functions are warning users of long lines or broken machines, as well as giving an indication of the overall voting experience.

TwitterVoteReport is meant to be a geographically-confined service so you can pinpoint what’s going on in your area. You can send in tweets (by use of #votereport), SMS, or voice mail messages. There are also iPhone and Android applications (user participation guide).

Your Network of Choice

The source for the most relevant info to you will be whatever microblogging platform you choose to use. There will be no shortage of election related material, so just listen in. You can also participate in election debates and discussions with other users you’re friends with. Sending tips about line lengths, tech issues and your overall experience.

There are plenty of options if you choose not to watch TV. The above are just cases of microblogging coverage, but there will also be an influx of blog posts and web content.

In case you hadn’t noticed, today is Halloween. Holidays are typically a time when websites all over the world deploy a special theme to their website for that day. Google is the leading example, changing its logo hundreds of times a year. So what are the microblogging networks doing for Halloween?

In short, not much. I searched around this morning and couldn’t find a whole lot of change for today’s events. I did find that both Twitter and FriendFeed are participating on some level, but no other networks have joined the fun. FriendFeed has changed its logo, and Twitter is allowing special Halloween-themed characters in tweets. First, FriendFeed’s logo:

Here’s a map of the special characters you can use on Twitter, as seen on thenextweb.org:

Holidays are a time of celebration and having fun. I’d really like to see more microblogs participate in festivities like this. Here’s to hoping future holidays will be more festive.

FriendFeed has a wealth of information crossing its public timeline each day. There are already methods in place to use the API to search for specific terms, but they’ve now added the ability to search on a domain or specific link. That makes it really trivial to build a daily digest of users who mention your website.

Developers can call the API in a few ways – either using CURL or reading the response directly into a variable. The response comes back in JSON form and there’s no option to have it come back as any other format. If you’re using PHP and have JSON libraries installed, you can do something like the following:

$response_array = json_decode($response, true);

Add true as the second argument to get the method to return an associate array, making it much easier to parse the response. The resulting array contains all the pertinent information you’d want to know about people mentioning links to your site, including publish time, the publishing user, the link they posted, all the comments and likes about the post, etc.

In a little under 45 minutes, I was able to create a daily digest for all links that point to microblink.com and all posts that mention microblink. The final step is to set it up in cron so it runs on a periodic basis. All results get emailed to anyone you want.

This is simple, useful way of tracking who’s talking about your website. There are certainly other ways to track that, such as Social Mention, but FriendFeed is another resource you can tap.

Microblink’s very own Mark Bockenstedt has been hard at work to provide football fans on Twitter and FriendFeed with a quick and simple way to get the final scores of every game this season. During week one of its release there were a few bugs that had to be worked out, but now his NFL scorebot has been tweaked and should be set for the rest of the season.

To be updated on game scores follow @nflscorebot on Twitter and nflscorebot on FriendFeed.

For more on the NFL scorebot and Mark’s other projects you can follow his personal blog.