allpositiveoptions.com

I’ll admit it. I’m more than a little frustrated about now. I have spent a considerable amount of time looking for the perfect application, widget, gadget, or whatever else you might want to call it that will allow me to easily share what I want, and how I want to do it, on the specific social media sites of my choosing. I still can’t seem to find it and I am hoping somebody will comment on this post with the solution I seek. Primarily through trial and error, here’s my established criteria:

1. I want to be able to selectively share on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, or simultaneously on up to all three. One pass and one click. Check the boxes you want to share on.
2. I want to be able to share content to include links, photos, videos, whatever, and all with one click from the web page that I may be reading.
3. I will want this app to fill in the content name, provide a shortened link if applicable, and allow me to comment on the post.
4. When I share content to FaceBook, FaceBook recognizes the link and does that “content conversion” thing to show what the post was about.
5. This application will also provide me with a way to easily send just a written update to any or all three of these services.
6. I am not interested in something that will also allow me to monitor feeds from these sites. I have other apps that already do that well and don’t need, or want, another.
7. I’m looking for a magic “button” that resides on my browser.

Here’s what I am using and why they do not meet these criteria. Please note that, for the areas listed, if these apps do in fact have these capabilities, I sure as hell can’t figure out how to do it (smile). Your corrections and advice will be highly appreciated!

1. TweetDeck or Seesmic: You need to cut and paste link info into the Tweet. Will also update to FaceBook but not to LinkedIn. Need to open the full client.
2. SocialScope: This is a BlackBerry app. It is, without question, the best Twitter app out there for the BlackBerry. IMHO. It comes close to meeting my needs as a sharing platform, however, my BlackBerry is painfully slow on web page loads and I want a desktop app. This will also not update to LinkedIn.
3. HootSuite: A great app and the Hootlet button is fab for grabbing content but, will not update to LinkedIn or FaceBook.
4. Streamy: May be the closest thing on a desktop but will not update to LinkedIn and is a full blown Twitter / FaceBook client. It also includes, however, a great reader and you can import feeds straight from your Google Reader account if desired.
5. Google Reader: They have just added a “send to” feature in Google Reader but it only works from within Reader itself and does not include LinkedIn. No way to send plain text updates.
6. Digsby: I looked at this yesterday and had high hopes. It will share to all three sites and does so nicely. It is also a full client that seems to run in the background. However, it just did not seem completely polished and my computer speed seemed to slow down substantially. Maybe just me? FYI. This was the only app I saw that actually will monitor update feeds from LinkedIn.
7. ShareThis: Works with all three sites and is a simple button on my browser. You do have to send different posts for all three sites, however. And, it does force you to send content to both FaceBook and LinkedIn. No simple text updates.
8. GizaPage: If all you are interested in is having one page where you can go and tab click to each of your actual social media sites, look at GizaPage. This site is actually designed as a place for you to send folks to learn more about you and connect to you. One link on your signature line. However, if you go to the page it will recognize you as the owner (at least from your desktop) and then you can go to any of your sites and operate them just as you would if you went to them directly.

Here seem to be the two best for what I want to do:

1. Hellotxt: This does not meet my exact specifications but it does allow you to update simultaneously to multiple sites, including LinkedIn, and include content on the updates. It’s really pretty cool. Check it out.
2. Ping.fm: Very similar to Hellotxt. Practically a twin. Also has some interesting apps including HootSuite and I had noticed previously that these two have some sort of relationship.

Ultimately, all of this comes down to specific needs and applications. Each of these tools excels in different areas. You will probably settle on selecting a few.

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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• I’m not sure what Streamy is, but it’s not FriendFeed (inquisitr.com)
• FriendFeed Alternative Streamy Hammered By New Traffic (mashable.com)
• Streamy Gets More Social, Instantly Becomes My New Start Page (techcrunch.com)
• Digsby launches URL shortener, adds global status update feature (downloadsquad.com)
• New ShareThis Widget (now with Twitter) (alexking.org)
• Google Reader Adds Social Sharing Options, Better Mark as Read and More (techie-buzz.com)
• HelloTxt Gives Admins the Ability to Post to Multiple Facebook Pages (insidefacebook.com)
• Update Your Social Networking Sites at Once With HelloTxt (geeksugar.com)
• Ping.fm + HootSuite: Distribute Your Tweets Everywhere (mashable.com)

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/streamy.php

http://vimeo.com/3765521?pg=embed&sec=

This page is from a reading and  writing  on the web lab group that I found on diigo. This article explains the things that Streamy can do,  like twitter, tweetdeck, and twhirl–all of which I (hopefully) will be figuring out after reading this article. You can check your feeds, your follower’s feeds, everything in your web communiverse. I have included the vimeo demonstration link so that you can see what the site looks like. Happy social networking!

Way back in mid-2007 there was a tremendous buzz when a video appeared on YouTube demonstrating a news feed aggregator and sharing service called Streamy. People begged for invites and the blogosphere went a little crazy writing about it.

Fast-forward two years. What was hailed at its inception as revolutionary, and a potential Digg-killer, is finally opening up in public beta today.

A lot has changed in two years, though. Sharing and commenting functionality around news feeds has become commonplace in other applications like Google Reader and FriendFeed. We’re already sharing our status on Twitter or Facebook, and most folks have made considerable time investments into crafting and customizing their own feed-reading experience.

Even the Streamy I’ve been using differs greatly from the original demo video. The overall concept is the same, but there are definitely some functions that have changed or are lost.

So is there still room for Streamy?

Perhaps. The user community is the great unknown in the Streamy equation. As a standalone news reader it is functional but the real value, if any, will be added by those who are also using the service.

During my beta experience the user base was small so it was hard to gauge just how this app would be utilized, but if enough folks adopt Streamy and use it to share and distribute content, there may be value there.

For a web worker, the recommendation and group functionality could be a useful way to share and receive information. Because the groups tend to be topic-based, the recommendations should be more targeted than the more general personal sharing on Google Reader, for example. The ability to view who else is subscribed to a particular feed can also help you locate folks with common interests and other sources of information online.

Streamy is a great looking app with a good solid foundation of features and functionality. We’ll have to wait and see if enough users step up and participate, adding the missing piece necessary to make Streamy a really valuable service.

Streamy is set to open up public beta today at 12:30 PST.

HBase contributors came together last weekend for the first ever HBase Hackathon here at Streamy HQ in Manhattan Beach, California.  In attendance were most of the HBase committers, guys from Sun and StumbleUpon… nearly 20 developers in total.  There are photos posted on the Meetup Page (for members only).  If anyone else who attended has pictures please post links in the comments!

We spent a great deal of time discussing the new features set for the 0.20 release of HBase.  You can follow all the issues slated for 0.20 here.  It’s been a few days and so much has already come out of the weekend so I thought I’d post a quick follow-up to share some of the cool stuff being worked on now.

Cascading Support for HBase
Chris Wensel, of Concurrent Inc., has successfully implemented the first version of HBase adapters for Cascading.  Streamy devs are really looking forward to refactoring some of their MapReduce jobs for Cascading!  We will report back soon.

HBase New File Format
We have hit a performance wall in HBase with the Hadoop MapFile format.  It was never intended for a random-access read pattern which is really the primary purpose of HBase.  Based on the hard work by guys over at Yahoo on the TFile binary file format, work is well under way on a new HBase-specific file format, currently being called HFile.  Michael Stack of Powerset and Ryan Rawson of StumbleUpon are leading the effort.

The emphasis is on speed and efficiency.  By switching to a block-based segmenting/indexing of the file, we can have predictable memory usage and an ideal abstraction for caching.  Once in memory, we can use something like Java’s NIO ByteBuffers to allow high numbers of concurrent scanners with minimal memory copying.  Remember, even random-access reads require scanning.  The new format also supports meta blocks for additional indexes, bloom filters, meta data and anything else we want to add in the future.

Cell Caching
Streamy’s own Erik Holstad is wrapping up testing, benchmarking and optimizing the new Cell Cache.  We’re seeing a 5-10X improvement in random-access speed when serving out of the cache.  A big part of this feature is implementing a memory-aware LRU in Java.  Since Java will not tell you the size of an Object in memory, we have had to hack our way around through profiling and some tools we’ve built to determine sizes.  More on this in a later post.

Zookeeper Integration
Jean-Daniel Cryans and Nitay Joffe have made leaps and bounds with Zookeper integration into HBase.  Initially designed to remove the single point of failure, discussions at the Hackathon opened the door to future improvements such as configuration management and even to eventually distribute master functionality and eliminate the HMaster all together.  They have already committed 5 issues to 0.20 trunk.  You can follow their progress here.

Datanode Network I/O Improvements
Andrew Purtell at Trend Micro is working on a Hadoop issue that creates a big headache for the users of HBase.  We keep a large numbers of files open at a time and since it is currently implemented using a thread-per-connection model, we end up with thousands of idle threads and having to keep increasing the total number of receivers.  I’m not sure where this currently stands.

My Random Contributions
In addition to voicing my opinion and contributing to design and decision making, I’m currently working on a number of small issues:  a binary key range splitting algorithm, the ability to run more than one mapper per region or to specify start and stop rows for MR jobs sourcing from HBase, and a number of benchmarking tools to evaluate all the new stuff.

All in all, it was a terrific weekend.  The weather was absolutely perfect and it was as friendly and smart a group as I could have imagined.  Thanks to everyone who came, especially those who made the trip down from Norcal and JD who came from Canada to defrost for a bit in the Cali sun.  Summer is coming soon, stay tuned for the next beach city hackathon

Today I gave a presentation on Hadoop, MapReduce, and HBase to the Los Angeles CTO Forum.  In addition to introducing the technologies and basic information about their implementations, there was a focus on how they compare to a traditional RDBMS.

You can find the presentation here

Peasant
Think! Café
January 30th 2008

Fortunate for me, while reading my daily Streamy subscriptions, I came across an article on Peasant, a musician I saw at the Indaba Loft in Manhattan during CMJ. There, he was promoting his soon to be released debut on Paper Garden Records, an excellent album I hope to review in the coming month. Brooklyn Vegan wrote some positive things about the artist and listed his upcoming show dates. I was thrilled to learn I would be able to catch him at the Washington Square Park area café Think!. Peasant was on a five date coffee house tour that began on January 29th and ended February 3rd. The concept could not have been more appropriate for the incredibly intimate nature of Peasant’s music.

I am glad to have been one of the first in New York City to have written about Peasant’s alluring style. Seeing him at Think! was the perfect opportunity to catch up on an artist who in the autumn of 2007 had already taken great steps toward becoming one of the truly solid singer/songwriters to emerge in 2008. His set up was simple and the temperature was certainly more bearable than his show at CMJ. Wine, cheese, and all sorts of espresso beverages were bought and consumed at this sophisticated café. The venue was fitting because Peasant’s gifts are introverted, inviting the audience’s attention rather than demanding it.

Peasant has a flawless voice. He has no trouble projecting authenticity and tenderness in front of a live audience or making such skilled songwriting seem like a casual expression. Also,  having a unique fashion makes for great coffee house conversation. He sports Tom’s Shoes, which are made in traditional Argentine style and are sold with the purpose of combating poverty. Peasant’s tenor voice combined with the melodic staccato of his acoustic guitar might come off as too reserved for some, but the depth written into songs such as Exposure is astounding. This combination of talent, style, authenticity, and social anxiety reflect an undeniably prolific musician. His melodies are saddening and contemplative; thoughts resounding within the confines of café walls; melancholy settling on the minds of thinkers, poets, and poseurs alike. You should listen to him not because he is known, or because is going to be known. You should listen to him because he is rich in character and one of the strongest young songwriters to make rounds in our subways, our streets, our coffee houses, and our clubs.

7/9

www.thatworksrecords.com
www.myspace.com/peasant

Upcoming Shows
Feb 10th @ Rockwood Music New York, New York
Feb 13th @ Club Midway, Stranded In Stereo party New York, New York
Feb 16th @ Winter Music Fest @ The Fire Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Feb 17th @ Siren Records Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Feb 29th @ John n’ Peter’s New Hope, Pennsylvania
Mar 13th @ Planetary Group Dayparty SXSW Austin, Texas
May 28th @ Intersoup Berlin, Berlin

I love seeing more and more copycat “intelligent” personalized news sites. The good news is that means that there are funders out there who still know in their gut that there’s money to be made on innovation in the news business. They just need the one idea that will stick. And go pop.

Meantime, more than a six months ago, Mike Arrington wrote about a site called Thoof. Back then, I was also writing and thinking about Streamy and FeedEachOther and other unmemorable twists on feed readers and personalized news sites. No matter their differences, they all seem the same. I just came across yet another—Tiinker—and I just can’t bear it any more.

In his write-up of Thoof, Arrington frames the debate as taking place between two competing positions. He believes that “the masses want popular news,” while the Thoof’s CEO believes that “the masses want tailored news.”

I think they’re both wrong and come at the issue the wrong way.

People want their news based on others’ interests—specialized news from friends (those who have similar interests) and widely popular news from the masses (everyone else). And they want their news based on their own interests, even if their friends don’t share those interests.

Now suppose there’s a continuum of users—from RegularJoe on one end to PowerUser on the other.

RegularJoe wants his news from other people. Although he has relatively few “friends” online, and is thinly connected to the ones he has, he wants them to put in most of the effort to help him get specialized news. (He likes read the “Most Emailed” news articles but doesn’t email them, or he likes visiting Digg but doesn’t log in and vote.) RegularJoe is mostly interested in widely popular news.

PowerUser is different and wants his news mostly based on his own interests. But it would be a mistake to think that he pursues his interests alone (no man is an island, says Donne). He has relatively many friends and enjoys pushing and pulling mutually interesting news to and from them. Of course, PowerUser also has news interests that his friends don’t share or don’t share as strongly, and so he pursue his news independently from his friends as well. Because he enjoys consuming a lot of information, moreover, PowerUser is also interested in widely popular news (he wants to keep his finger to the pulse).

These purely black-box algorithmic personalized news sites don’t really fit either guy.

RegularJoe: They’re too hardcore for RegularJoe. He doesn’t want his own news because his interests just aren’t sufficiently deeply cultivated. RegularJoe isn’t motivated enough to build up a profile by clicking “thumbs up” all the time (as tiinker would have him). When he is motivated enough, he isn’t sufficiently consistent over time for these fancy algorithms to get him what he wants before he strays back to cnn.com because it’s easier to let someone else decide (a person-editor, in this case).

PowerUser: They’re too secret for PowerUser. He wants to put in more effort cultivating his interests and doesn’t want to trust an (anti-social) algorithm from some start-up that might disappear tomorrow. PowerUser also wants to get specialized news from niche groups of friends. For him, the fact that friends X, Y, and Z read some blog post makes it inherently more interesting because they can have a conversation about it (broadly speaking). The personalized news sites just aren’t sufficiently social for the PowerUser who wants to interact with friends around the news.

This isn’t meant to be a slam-dunk argument. I’m not sure about what happens with the group of users who are in the hypothetical middle of the continuum. Maybe there’s some number of users (1) who care enough about the news to have non-trivial interests that don’t shift or fade over time but (2) who also don’t care very much for a transparent or social experience of the news. Ultimately, however, I really doubt that this group of users is big enough to support this kind of personalized news site.

My list contains:

Orgoo
Zen Be
Twine.com
FFFFOUND! -no more invitation!
shopflick
flowgram
tunesbag
socialthing
blippr
Behance.net
Hubdub
Ping.fm – Use This Invite Code: pingfriends
Yahoo! Mash
BravoNation – From Yahoo! – ( 9 invitations left)
Jaiku
DropBox
8apps (Site is now closed)
Streamy (3 invitations left)
SnapFoo (8 invitations left)
ffwd ( 3 invitations left)
lawyrs.net
Hobnox
Evernote
Gilt
PageOnce
Dripbook( 95 invitations left)
Wallop
iminta
digsby.com –> use this invite code for registration : digbyfriends
PMOG ( 2 invitations left)
SeeToo
YouFig?
TVJunkies( 1 invitation,no more!)
iubo ( 1 invitation left)
Wamily
Moola.net
Open People –> Register Here
Fairtilizer
Pownce
Grono
Jump Chart
Mixaloo
Spock
Tractis
iMedix
Hey Nielsen
Dopplr
Yumondo
BeFunky

Following Sites are open for registering:

TreasureMyText
GrooveShark
Mugr
Coworker.net
Joost
dzire
YouSwop
WeeWar
outquib.com
Bubbletop
Mogad

…then you should check out FeedEachOther. That’s what Marshall Kilpatrick of R/WW says. If you were let down with Streamy, on the other hand, it looks like you will also be let down by FeedEachOther.

What’s the bummer? These “feature-rich super-social RSS readers” just aren’t that feature-rich or social. They’re just not so different from Google Reader. They’re still RSS readers.

But first the good news. The thing pulls comments from the original blog into the reader. That’s awesome. Multiple kinds of relationship are good too.

I don’t want to subscribe to “similar” feeds according to some recommendation that’s a huge black box. In fact, it doesn’t really even work, and its black-boxiness prevents me from knowing why. Why, for instance, does FeedEachOther only give me recommendation based on the whole feed? Why not on each post? Whole feeds contains posts way too diverse to derive sufficiently sufficient semantic patterns from them.

It’s not okay to look at all of Jeff Jarvis’s feed and offer me this string of banal tags: “advertizing – buzz – internet – news – technology – blogs – daily – marketing – politics – web – blog – commentary – jarvis – online – trends – business – imported – media – tech – web2.0 – blogging – culture – journalism – opinion – tv.” Setting aside the problem of blogs-blog-blogging, it’s not okay because they’re so generic and because I can’t stack them up and take their intersections. I can’s use these tags the way the people who created them use them. When someone in delicious tags something “journalism,” they might also tag it “trends.” Neither topic is interesting alone; only together are they interesting. (Indeed, ‘trends in journalism’ is very interesting.)

Plus! On top of reading each post’s comments with a feed, I can share notes and items within the system. But wait! “The only thing better” would be to post comments from the web app to the original post? Actually, that’s a lot better. That’s worlds and worlds better. A web app is still just a basic RSS reader until it can weave itself into the same cloth of which the many, many thousands of blogs with their comments are made.

So, no, “the absence of offline and mobile modes, weaker analytics than Google Reader offers and a limit of 500 feeds by OPML import” are not the “only shortcomings.” Someone’s seriously drinking the RSS Reader Kool-Aid. And that’s too bad—because RSS itself is so many times greater and more magnificent.

In the end, Google Reader, Streamy, and FeedEachOther are bastions of only ONE component of networked news. They allow readers to network the news by publisher. Sure, they do more than dabble in allowing readers to network by fellow readers. There’s got to be more though—comments from reader to blog would be a big step. Lastly, both Streamy and FeedEachOther just don’t have the necessary kind of semantic (or “Semantic”) insight into their content yet. The three components of networked news must be as one for any to be truly worthwhile.

When will my news platform serve me up content that’s from my favorite author and recommended by my good buddy and about my favorite subject or story or beat? When that happens, we’ll not only all be reading our own really interesting stuff—we’ll care enough about it to get into even more interesting conversations.

A little update, I managed to get a Streamy invite from someone on my Pownce friends list. So, I’m now a member of Streamy and will get a review written and posted within a week or so. The reason it’s gone up from a few days to a week is that I start college again tomorrow, so I will have a lot less time to sit in front of the computer checking out Streamy.

By the way, now that I am a Streamy member, I have one invite to give away (one has already been sent to a friend). So, leave me a comment and I will send an invite your way. Seeing as I only have one invite, it will be on a “first come, first serve” basis.

Still on the subject of invites, I’m also now a member of Mash. So if you would like an invite to Mash, leave a comment and I’ll send you an invite. It seems Mash invites are unlimited, any amount of people can ask for a Mash invite.
Same goes with Pownce invites, leave a comment if you want one but I only have nine left.

Update:
I’ve just sent my last Streamy invite so there are no more of those left. I still have Mash and Pownce invites though; so if you want any of those, feel free to leave a comment.

Update 2:
Mark, the first person to reply, has offered to send a Streamy invite if anyone else wants one. So we’re back to having one Streamy invite to send. Get your comments in!

It seems that I totally missed out on the existence of Streamy, which is strange because I was pretty excited about it when I heard about it before it went live.

Anyway, if anyone has any invites knocking around, I’d be insanely grateful if you could send me an invite. For anyone without invites, assuming I can get an invite, I’ll be writing a review after I’ve had a few days to play around with it.

In the mean time, I’ve just registered at Jaiku so I will probably write up a little review of that soon. For now though it looks pretty cool; it seems a lot like Twitter but with a more sleek design and the ability to post RSS or Atom feeds to your Jaiku page. You can also send texts to Jaiku and they will post to your Jaiku page. Now, Twitter does have this but it isn’t free, like Jaiku. At least, it wasn’t when I last used Twitter.

Update:
I should clarify that by free, I meant that Jaiku is free for me. It counts as a normal text message so you are charged your standard network rate. Since I get a set amount of free texts a month (and being in the UK, receiving texts is free), it is essentially free for me. If you are on a “pay as you go” tariff (or your country’s equivalent), it will not be free for you; but you will only be charged your standard rate.

Update 2:
I just checked the Twitter site and it seems that standard rates apply to people in the US but texts to the UK number sometimes count as an international number, depending on the network. So it looks like standard rates may apply, or they may not.

*Read Digital Music News on Universal’s possible plans for a subscription-based service.

*Apple has sold 1 million iPhones. Also, BusinessWeek asks: Does Apple want a piece of the wireless spectrum?

*Kanye and Fitty want you to know: It’s Kanye vs. 50 Cent day.

*Make way for another Tron movie. [Pop Candy]

*Facebook is doing another round of funding. So they can buy people. I still only have a fake Facebook account.

*Philly experimental label Fried Tapes embraces the cassette tape.

*Where is Dan Deacon’s green skull? Additionally, with the redirects and the poor site and search performance, Pitchfork’s digital practices are an eff you to readers. Just saying.

*I just signed up for Streamy, a sort of uber-feed reader with sharing and other social media components. Hopefully, I’ll have time to look at it.

My traffic stats tell me that streamy.com refers a few readers to my blog every so often. I think it’s great that a few people are reading my blog from Streamy. When do I get an invitation and the accompanying ability to read my blog and others there? I really want to know to what extent it’s a network of readers and a network of the people and the issues in the news.

I’m hopeful for the former but will be surprised if Streamy’s “filters” can master the latter.

For a goodly time now, expect to see this blog try to flesh out this concept of networked news by reviewing isites that concern themselves with the news, either completely or substantially—from the New York Times to digg to Google Reader to Mario Romero’s awesome Google Reader Shared Items app for Facebook to Topix to Memeorandum to Pageflakes to Thoof to Streamy to whatever else with which I may cross paths.

I’ve got my three metrics, and it’s time to make sense of them. Maybe along the way we’ll figure out what some bright person could do to satisfy Arrington’s appropriately underwhelmed feeling about online news. Maybe we’ll figure out that “networked journalism” has something to do with networked news. Maybe not.

But what’s first?

Networked news describes a structure for consuming information. It means pulling in your news from a network of publishers—bloggers and traditional news outlets. It means pulling in your news from a network of readers—friends and experts and so on. And, crucially, networked news means breaking down the bits of content into their relevant constitutive pieces and reforming those pieces back into their own network. It means pulling in your news from a data-driven network of the people and the issues in the news—people like George W. Bush and Steve Jobs and Oprah and issues and memes from “republican” and “iraq war” and “campaign 2008″ to “iPhone” to “power of forgiveness.”

The concept of networked news grows out of the realization that the stories we care about exist between one author and another, between articles and blog posts, between newspapers and blogs. The story is a kind of thread that runs through time and in and out of the person-subjects and issue-topics of the news.

Networked news is not networked journalism, which is a structure for publishing information. See pressthink, buzzmachine, and newassignment.net for that parallel “genius” project to grow and diversify the number of sources from which we pull our news.

The first and second components of networked news are new but not unprecedented. Pulling in your news from a network of publishers is what we do when we subscribe to RSS feeds and read them in one place. It’s the river of news I read when I fire up Google Reader, which gives me news about the tech industry, about finance, and about politics. Techmeme, Memeorandum, Google News, and other memetrackers are other great examples of networking news from publishers. Newsmap, based on Google News, is the picture of this first component. Thoof and other news-focused web apps with similar recommendation engines also represent this publisher-based side of networked news.

Pulling in your news from a network of other readers is what Mario Romero is working on with his Google Reader Shared Items application for facebook. It’s also what Digg and others represent.

There are sites that represent both the first and second components of networked news. It’s what Newsvine, Topix, Daylife, and others represent. It’s what Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle and others represent. Though I haven’t actually toyed with the site yet (I’m still waiting on that invite, guys) it looks like Streamy sits at the current bleeding edge of the reader-based front of networked news.

The third component of networked news is, in some ways, the oldest, represented by simple searches to Google News or Technorati tags. It’s also the most difficult component—technically, socially, you name it. When I encourage Mario to let users browse his Google Reader Shared Items by tag, I’m encouraging him to let us readers of news pull in bits of content by issue and meme. When Streamy claims to have “filters”—which I called “substance- and source-based ways browse, and subscribe to, kinds of content, by keyword and original author, respectively”—it’s claiming to have taken a few steps into the this elusive third component of networked news.

One kind representation of this third component, in the form of how Exxon putatively buys scientific research, is graphic. The “story” is the whole visual network, while the actors are broken down and interconnected within it. The bits of content, in this case, come in the form of profiles on each actor pictured. People and foundations are linked up by bridges connecting them. Those bridges, exxonsecrets says, represent the money that Exxon funnels through the foundations to pay the people to conduct and promote bogus climate research. Users can create, manipulate, and save their own graphical network maps for all to see.

A swirl of excited ideas in my head, it’s all rather tough to articulate. But I’ll get to it soon enough, bit by bit.

I can’t get enough of how Michael Arrington, at TechCrunch, rags on personalized new sites. I love it. Talking about the newest venture to join the hunt for a killer solution to online news, Arrington writes of Streamy, “It’s pretty and extremely well thought-out, but it’s not clear that it does anything new enough to grab people’s attention.” Plus, “It is well designed, has lots of intelligent features, and is almost sure to drop into obscurity immediately after launch.” What a guy!

For now, I’ll withhold real judgment—especially of the claims made here—till I’ve had a chance to check out the private beta, to which I’ve requested an invitation.

Meantime, I’m impressed with the social networking and what they call “filters,” which are essentially substance- and source-based ways browse, and subscribe to, kinds of content, by keyword and original author, respectively. Ideally, that would mean that someone could set up his personalized page to pull in everything Arrington says about, say, “personalized news.” The trick, then, is how social networking brings the virus to the filter. Your friend’s becomes your filter and then it becomes my filter; my filter becomes yours, your friend’s, his friend’s, and so on.

Note that amateurs don’t have to control these filters either. Arrington could promote his own, using them to help him slice up his content along different lines, potentially overlapping lines, and push it out Streamy readers of news, if there ever are any. Or these filters could allow someone to become an editor, much the way Scoble acts as an editor (choosing the news) with what he calls his link blog. If I were running Streamy, I’d be thinking about how I could allow users to monetize their filters. They are, after all, just platforms for subscriptions. Find a way to allow an expert on some tricky topic like global warming sell you his daily digest of the best reading on climate change. He could write his own original material as well, of course, and include it in his filter.

I agree with Arrington that integrating IM is smart, and integrating the ability to drag and drop stories is super smart. I wonder how popular it will become for sites to integrate IM. Will the New York Times have it some day? Will espn.com? It seems to make sense to distribute IM over virtual locations rather than keep it all cooped up in one place. If I were running meebo, I’d be thinking about how I could build a proprietary web-based IM client just for the New York Times. (From what I can tell, Jake Jarvis has tried to turn meebo into a Facebook app. I signed up, but got an error: “There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of Meebo are trying to iron out….”) I love meebo almost as much as Arrington’s orneriness.

Here’s the screencast of Streamy: