By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

The one problem I had been having with SocialMedian was the need to manually "clip" stories that I find interesting on the internet. Many social news sites, i.e. Digg, Mixx, etc., use this model with great results. SocialMedian has been trying to focus on getting relevant information in front of their users, while maintaining the voting and commenting mainstays of social news. By allowing users to create news networks, and making the follower/submitter model a little more influential, they tried to create automated content filters. With the early addition of user-configurable "volume for noise levels", they also tried to avoid the spamming of stories to several networks.

These were fantastic additions, but as anyone who has used social news sites, adding stories manually to a site is a lot of work. In this past week, SocialMedian dropped more barriers to using their service. They had a big week implementing blog and Google Reader automated integration into a user's clipped stories. This makes the service significantly easier for many people to use. The Google Reader integration will also take your shared notes and include them as a comment on a clipped story.

See Also:

• Social Median Integrates With Google Reader for News Discovery
• Social Median Revamps and Introduces "News Streaming"

To give you an idea of what this means for user adoption, I will give you an example. I used to visit the site every few days and browse around. When the announcements were made this past week, I again browsed around but my activity had not been imported yet. On the second day, I visited a few times to reply to comments and review new subscribers. The third day, I again visited a few times for comments and I started looking at the stories that other people had clipped in my news networks. I am now trying to work the site into my daily routine because the Google Reader shares and the blog importing has added to the quality and timeliness of the stories clipped on the site. These fairly simple ideas could be a major boon to SocialMedian.

This also got me thinking. SocialMedian allows you to link several services to your profile, like Twitter and FriendFeed. I believe more is coming as well in the form of FriendFeed and Digg integration. By doing this type of integration, they are not really just a social news site. It is a combination of social news and aggregation or lifestreaming. So, is SocialMedian trying to compete with FriendFeed? I do not think so as they are mostly complementary services at this point. However, by dabbling in lifestreaming and aggregation, the number of their competitors easily doubles.

This brings me to another point. John McCrea of Plaxo had a really interesting point on the lifestreaming and aggregation applications:

"Can the pure-play Social Web Aggregators grow fast and long enough to achieve escape velocity before the big former walled garden services, like Facebook and MySpace, re-invent themselves into true Social Web Aggregators?"

Facebook has their news feeds, but they seem minimally useful right now. FriendFeed has a very good lead on Facebook, but they are still an aggregration service. They really need to start adding functionality to stay ahead. The beta is excellent so far, but is it enough to keep Facebook far behind?

With SocialMedian adding various activity streams, they become a very interesting property. Social news sites do not import activity streams in any way. FriendFeed does not have the voting that social news sites use. SocialMedian has both and they have interesting filtering. I do not see Facebook overtaking FriendFeed any time soon, but there is that possibility. There is no chance that Facebook can move fast enough to catch SocialMedian within the next year.

In the past week, SocialMedian has changed the core of what they are and it is a good thing. Are they a prime target for a buyout, or will they be the next Web darling? I think they would be an interesting purchase for someone looking to get into the news and aggregation space, Google perhaps? I have no power to make them a Web darling, but they are making it hard for people to not notice them.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

When FriendFeed rolled out their new proposed interface in beta, I didn't rapidly adapt to using their most-visible new feature, lists. The list feature lets you essentially group friends you're following into smaller groups, with common examples being "Favorites", "Family", "Business", etc. The lists feature also allows you to remove people from your home feed, or all feeds, reducing their impact on your browsing experience, and should you be of the nefarious kind, letting you "fake follow" someone, so their feelings are satiated, even though you have no interest in seeing their data.

Since I started using the service almost a year ago, I've been one of the more visible proponents of absorbing the noise, and giving every other user equal footing. But as I took on more people I found interesting, I was losing touch with the original users I followed, missing key conversations, and a lot of the most-active subject matter was trending away from what I typically like to discuss.

This week, I realized I needed to do something about it, and lists is a great tool to start. Using lists correctly will let me follow even more people, and not lose track of those users or conversation where I want to be engaged. So, over the last two days, I've been spending as much time organizing people into lists as I have enjoying the content that's been flowing through FriendFeed. (See the example on the left for how I could organize Drew Olanoff's content in multiple lists.)


A list made just for the FriendFeed employees
At work and at home, I file all my e-mail. For example, I have top level folders for "Personal", "Family", "Commerce", and "Blog", and thinking of people on FriendFeed the same way isn't that much of a stretch.

So the game plan, essentially, was to:

1) Take every single person out of my home feed. Everybody.
(Think of this as the equivalent of "In Box Zero")
2) Put popular, brand-name users into a list called "A-List"
3) Put those of us on the next rung into a list called "B-List"
4) Make separate, specific lists for the FriendFeed team, and Guest Bloggers on this site.
5) Make a list of "Real World Friends".
6) Make a list of "Techies" who I engage with, whose work I respect, or whose tools I review here.
7) Put every other person not in 2-6 on something that for now, I'm calling the "Back Page".

Taking the A-List out of the main feed may let others breathe
The idea is that once I put 95% of those I follow on the "Back Page", I can selectively walk through that list, which has replaced my home feed, and pull people to a new list called "Front Page", which will include must-follow people I've met on the service over the last year.

With this in place, I now need to go the "A-List" feed to read everything from Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Thomas Hawk, Steve Rubel, Michael Arrington and others, whose feeds are often very active, and don't have them interspersed with folks who have less awareness, and usually, less interaction, essentially separating the lions from the lambs.

It also sets me up with multiple smaller feeds that are easier to consume. I also expect to set up more-specific lists, such as one for ReadBurner, for the team there, as I did for the FriendFeed employees. As I continue to update these lists, and move people from the "Back Page" to the "Front Page", I won't just have one massive FriendFeed, but many smaller ones with specific flavors and interests. And most importantly, now, with lists, I can be sure not to miss anything from Mona. Seriously, go check her feed out.

This move may be controversial, especially if people don't like the idea of being on the "Back Page", or start to see the "Back Page" list in their referral logs, but it will help me to feel like I can start adding people again, where before I was slowing down, and it might soon be as second nature as filing my e-mail as it comes in. One thing I won't be doing is hiding people entirely and doing a "fake follow".

I'm not the only one turning to FriendFeed's beta lists for help. See Mark Hopkins' approach here: Beta FriendFeed to the Rescue? If you're using the new FriendFeed, how are you using lists?

With only a few exceptions, it's been universally accepted that Apple's move to sell iPhone applications on its iTunes store is an unqualified success. In fact, it's widely believed that Microsoft will soon follow suit, offering a centralized place to acquire and download applications for Windows Mobile. But in speaking with other iPhone users, I've heard concerns voiced that there is no way to use an application on a trial basis. We know Apple has the capability to use DRM to limit the amount of time a customer can rent a movie, so why not use the same technology to let users try apps for days or weeks?

Software developers outside the world of the iPhone have a number of ways to try and gain compensation for their work. Some give it away via freeware. Others use what's called donationware, which essentially means the product is free, but they provide a way for you to donate money, should you want to. Even more popular is shareware, which has a listed price, but lets you download it for free, and pay later, often limited to a number of users, or through repeat annoyances that make you want to upgrade. And, of course, you have software that's only available at full price, or in retail packages.

But so far, Apple's iPhone App Store only offers two options - free, and paid. And if you've paid for a premium application, and it turns out you don't like it, tough luck.

Practically the only way an application developer can offer users a way to "try before they buy" is to offer a free "lite" version on the iTunes App Store in addition to a premium version. Customers who want the additional features of the paid application would try the lite version and then buy a second, parallel, application, and need to delete the old.

This inflexibility is unnecessary given Apple's experience with setting DRM to give users a limit to how many times they can burn playlists to CDs and how long they have to watch movies rented from iTunes. Given that a text description and small pictures displayed on the iTunes store isn't always a great representation of the user's experience with the software app, it makes sense for the company to work with developers to offer time or use-based limits to software, which would first be free and later prompt to be paid for. The ability to try applications before buying them wold reduce consumers' concerns and still offer developers a way to make a return on their investment. DRM doesn't always have to be bad - it can help both users and content creators.

Earlier this week, Google launched their new Web browser, Chrome, in a unique way - explaining what's a very technical product in the most user friendly way they could, by using a comic book. While the Web version of this book has been linked to time and again, print copies of the book are very rare, distributed to those who Google determined were top press targets, both online and off. The Inquisitr's Duncan Riley received one, and rather than put the book on his mantle, he's auctioning off the potential collectors' item for charity, in what has to be seen as a win/win scenario.

You can bid on auction yourself via eBay, and Riley has offered the full proceeds to be split between Beth Kanter and Beyond Blue.


A frame from the Chrome comic
More details can be found on Riley's post on the subject, but he has said he'd be delighted if the two charities could split proceeds greater than $1,000. It's an interesting opportunity to get your hands on a piece of Web history and provide aid to those who need it. And if you're not interested enough to bid up the auction, maybe my own initial bid will stand up. You see... I'm not big enough for Google to have sent me one, so I'm headed to eBay for Duncan's copy. See if you can outbid me here: http://bit.ly/ebaychrome.