In 2009 FriendFeed continued their dominance as the clear leader in the social streaming* space. But in the middle of the year when they were acquired by Facebook, their future path was largely in question and many users began seeking alternative services. FriendFeed has a pretty devoted community and while many continue to still use the service they are keeping an eye on any up and coming alternatives.

(*Social Streaming is the aggregation of multiple users’ Lifestreams with a community built around it to foster discussion)

Cliqset has become one of the top services now mentioned as a possible FriendFeed alternative and users appear to be watching them closely. Today they launched a slew of changes that continue shaping themselves as a premier social streaming service.

They’ve re-designed the UI quite a bit making changes that provide a simpler and more straightforward experience. It also paved the way for some of the functionality to snap neatly into place which includes several great additions.

File sharing is now available that also offers features within the service depending on the file type. For instance MP3’s will provide an in-line player once uploaded.

Groups functionality has been added which now offers niche based areas to be created which are isolated and separate from the regular user streams. These can be used to create areas that revolve around hobbies, brands, or any other niche you can imagine creating a custom stream for.

I see both of these features as evolutionary that now gets them closer to the standard feature set offered by FriendFeed and I’ll need to play with them some more to identify any distinguishing differences or nuances that make them different but these are important additions that helps get them up to par.

The feature which is unique to them and the coolest in my opinion for this release is their Streams. This allows you to create a custom filter that allows you to dial it in by Activity Type (blogs, photos, bookmarks, etc.)  Users, and Services. This feature helps set them up for what I feel is one of social streaming’s biggest challenges which is to fine tune the meaningful content we want to see on a daily basis from the mountain of data coming in. This is a nice first step but I look forward to watching this evolve with some automated logic.

They’ve also updated their Air client which although I haven’t tried yet, co-founder Darren Bounds gave me a demo and it looked pretty cool allowing a nice customizeable drag and drop column based interface that offered a way to organize the streams a little more effectively than the web app. And if you fancy yet another way to consume your streams they also released a fresh new Firefox extension as well. As if that’s not enough there’s also support for Boxee now!

Louis Gray calls Cliqset the “Swiss army knife for Web service updates” and with all these new tools it’s easy to see why. But although these updates are all front-end consumer facing Cliqset has also done everything they can to implement open standards across the board within their platform including using Activity Streams and leveraging Pubsubhub. ReadWriteWeb also wrote about the efforts with their FeedProxy release to enable developers to take advantage of their platform.

I feel that as technology continues to march on over the next year and FriendFeed not actively being devloped, Cliqset is in a great position. With their eyes focused on building an open standards based platform that is developer friendly, offering real-time updates functionality, and continuing to release features to easily share and create discussions around streaming content, Cliqset is on a path towards becoming the new king of social streaming services.

If you’re already on Cliqset or going to join, you can connect with me on here.

You can read more on Cliqset’s release

• Cliqset Upgrades Aggregator with Groups, Activity Streams – Louis Gray
• Cliqset Update Includes File Sharing and a Firefox Plugin – Mashable (Christina Warren)
• FriendFeed Clone Cliqset Upgrades Real-Time Platform With Sharing, Groups And Firefox Add-On – TechCrunch (Leena Rao)

Awesome development reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick about Cliqset pushing Lifestreaming (and the ActivityStreams) initiatives further along.

That means activities from all those services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works.

via ReadWriteWeb | The Day The Highway Went Coast-to-Coast: 70+ SocNet Feeds Normalized by New API.

This is a guest post from reader Trae Blain. You can visit his site at traeblain.com. If you are interested in writing a guest post, just head on over to the contact page.

Cliqset has been around for a while, but I have just recently stumbled across their service. The easiest way to describe Cliqset is that it’s much like Plaxo in that it wants to be your centralized profile. You can add all your contact info into Cliqset and you’re profile will be viewable to all or just your set of contacts which are also added to Cliqset. This ties you and your contacts information and web activity together into one site.

Cliqset enters the lifestreaming world by including all your various web content into your profile. See Example. The profile page is standard fair, as far as profile pages go, with your online content placed in a steady stream. The items are nicely grouped together so you don’t get a long stream of pictures when you decide to upload all your vacation pictures, usurping all your other activity.

The main feature that sets Cliqset apart is not its lifestream capabilities, but its platform that you can use to ensure all your social profiles are the same. This can help bring unity among all your social profiles. Also Cliqset provides you with a OpenID url that is the same as your profile url. This can further help in unifying your online identity. I have not been able to dive into the platform tool much.

Cliqset can aggregate from 30 social services including location based services like Brightkite and FireEagle.  Adding each service is very straight forward and simple. Most of the items simply ask for your username and many (as far as setting up your profile goes) don’t ask for any login credentials. Adding my Yahoo profile was the only item I had some difficulty getting setup.

Cliqset is a nice, clean profile site with lifestreaming capabilites. It supports many features that profile pages offered by Google and Yahoo do not provide. Cliqset can most closely resemble Plaxo in number of features for your online profile.