You know what goes well with I Can Has Cheezburgers? MLKSHKs. In the vein of simple and addictive sites revolving around fun photos, images and community, MLKSHK, the brainchild of Andre Torrez of Simpleform, and formerly of Federated Media, MLKSHK opened its doors tonight (yes, on Friday the 13th) to push you to share your online findings with friends. As I found with late night discussions on Convore prior to that site's unveiling, the combination of creative friends and fun images strewn about the Web can often be side-splittingly funny, and MLKSHK hopes to capture all that in one place - organized by categories, and each share gaining the option to get user interaction in the forms of comments, saves and likes.

MLKSHK (obviously pronounced "Milkshake") separates grouped discussions and shares in what they call "Shakes". You can view shakes from all your friends, find featured shakes chosen by the community, or browse by collections, from animated GIFS, to comics, typography, all manner of TV shows, and of course, off the wall stuff one would expect from a @torrez or @mat project, like "Booze makes it all better" and "Roboshake 2084".


Do I expect to be a lot more productive with my life now that MLKSHK is open to the public after having early access for two months? No. Do I expect to jump in and find yet another site full of silliness and images that everybody wants to see but pretends they don't? Absolutely.


As the service's front page says, "Easily save images from everywhere on the web. The silly ones, the sweet ones, the cool ones, and the gross ones—then share them with your friends and family. Join groups of other people who like the same silly and cool stuff you do and contribute your own."


I've been in tons of silly communities, and most of them end up having a tremendous number of frothy conversations around silly images, be they started on FriendFeed or Facebook, the old Brizzly, Convore and now MLKSHK. Wrinkle your eyebrows at this entry to the world or not, but you know this is the site everybody wanted. Go forth and share.

Twitter's direct messaging system is an easy way for two people to engage in back and forth discussion through the site, but the serve and volley type of chat is a far cry from real-time, and doesn't allow for broader group chat. Today, Joint, brought to you from the team behind LazyFeed and LazyScope, is launching to bring the flow of instant messaging and semi-persistent chat topics to your existing Twitter social graph. You can get your exclusive invite by posting a comment or by following @imjoint on Twitter.

With group chat applications on mobile being all the rage, the desktop experience has been somewhat forgotten, but a dedicated app presents the best keyboard and CPU cycles to avoid any latency between updates, argues founder Ethan Gahng. And once you've tried Joint with a friend or two, you can see how fast you can go from the ping pong manner of DMs in Twitter to real, instant, conversation.


You first get connected with Joint through getting invited by a friend through a dedicated, personal, URL. (Such as this one) You are then asked to download a small Adobe AIR client that runs on multiple platforms, and near instantly discovers your Twitter social graph, letting you have real-time chats with people to whom you are bidirectionally connected. This way, all of those with whom you can send and receive DMs can also chat with you in Joint.


If your friends are using Joint, public chat rooms they have created are displayed in the left sidebar, so you can pop into any chat room and start talking with those who are there. It's a lot like Convore, but on the desktop, and designed as much for 1-1 communication as for static topic chats. In fact, the chat rooms in Joint are set up so that new users who join a room don't see previous entries. Magically, if every user leaves a chat room, it too disappears, so don't be surprised if you set up a popular room more than once.


What makes Joint even more like the well-known world of instant messaging (IM) is the idea of status indicators. A green status bubble means you are signed in, while a clock shows you are idle. Once in, you can create a room with any topic, or invite any of your friends to join you. You have the option to create the room with three types - Public, Protected, or Stealth. Clearly, public rooms are open to all, protected means the creator requires a password, and stealth rooms are not displayed at all - even to friends. To get into a protected room, you must be invited, or enter the known password. Stealth rooms even feature a cool stealth bomber icon.

Before you shrug off Joint as "yet another chatroom" service, think of using this first to replace those back and forth DM sessions you've no doubt had with friends, and then think about starting real group chat with your Twitter social graph. Want to get in? Leave me a comment, and follow @imjoint on Twitter. This one's a keeper.

The new Web never runs out of great ideas for small groups of people to discuss topics with friends, share catchy images and videos and collaborate. From the earliest BBSes to public chatrooms, lifestreaming applications and today's social networking powerhouses, people are constantly searching for new communities and looking for new tools that make it easier to share - either to the general public or in private groups. Even as 2007 to 2009 saw an explosion of mass broadcasting tools letting you reach thousands of people with the same identical message, 2010 and 2011 are seeing a retrenching into more private groups, centered on similar interests, shared experiences or location - hence mobile apps like Beluga, Yobongo, GroupMe and TextPlus. On the Web, you've also seen groups play a role on Facebook, FriendFeed previously and many other sites.

For the last few months, I've been spending way too much of my time in the late evenings on a fun site so secret I never told you - not because of its dark subject matter or inappropriate content, but simply because it hadn't yet been ready to launch. Today, Convore goes live. Started by Eric Florenzano, Eric Maguire and Leah Culver, formerly of Pownce via Six Apart, the team has been building what Florenzano called "a targeted subset of FriendFeed", the once popular social networking site that rose quickly and fell in the eyes of Silicon Valley nearly as fast, being overweighted with features that may have confused the message.


Eric told me, in a 1-1 phone interview at the beginning of the year that what Convore is interested in is groups and group-based apps, including the communication aspects of this medium. The site is designed with each topic having its own chat room, in a smaller group, for those folks who are interested in specific topics.


"We want each group to have its own identity," Eric said. "As Twitter has grown, it is less easy to say things we once did. With a smaller group of your friends, you can feel a lot more comfortable saying whatever the heck you want."

Like any good geek-initiated site, much of Convore's initial discussions have centered around tech, the benefits of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Internet memes. Where the product is especially fun is in sharing of rich media, as the service auto-supports image URLs and hosts them locally. With some momentum, a silly image share can lead to a real-time barrage of sharing from friends that is hard to duplicate anywhere else. You can also star items to reward posters or save the updates for later.

Lest the overlap with FriendFeed be too clear, Convore is funded by Y! Combinator, which includes Paul Buchheit, cofounder of FriendFeed, and a former Facebooker. It's also worth noting the site does not aggregate any external content, but only hosts new discussions. If you start engaging with other users of the site, a helpful "bell" that signals new updates in threads where you are active can keep you as addicted as Pavlov's dog. I've made hundreds of updates there and no doubt will be putting more time into one of my favorite sites. Check it out at http://www.convore.com.