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)

I was at BlogWorld Expo sitting next to Louis Gray at a panel when news came out that Twitter lists had been launched. Louis went to his Twitter page and sure enough he saw the feature and started playing with it. I on the other hand did not see the feature when I went to my page. Because we saw the news on Twitter we didn’t realize it was a small limited rollout of the feature to a select few.

As Louis continued to test the feature we noticed the url path to get to find out what lists a given user is on which is http://twitter.com/<username>/lists/memberships. But you only will get the results if your Twitter account is list enabled, otherwise all you get is a blank screen.

So I asked Louis if he could pull up my name to see if I was on any lists and he obliged and then sent me the screenshot you see below.

From the image you can glean quite a bit of information and start to see the value that this will bring to Twitter and its users. From the image I can see the users that have put me on lists along with the names they gave them and how many other people follow the list. I can imagine someone coming out with a tag cloud for users based on the keywords used in the lists they appear on. Or perhaps instead of users who are self serving when they add themselves to WeFollow (present company included) someone will create a version that is based on what others have deemed you. That follower number is also interesting as it can act as an authority value coupled with the users who are adding them. As you can see there are some great possibilities here. Conversely it will make for an interesting search to see who’s landed on the most douchebag lists

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit Twitter CEO Evan Williams stated that he hates the much criticized Twitter suggested user list and can’t wait for this new feature to be relased. I too am very excited about the possibilities offered by having this functionality built-in directly into the service and accessible by the API. I’m sure we’re going to see some more interesting services that will utilize this data to create authority and trusted users lists that can then be used for all sorts of interesting things.

I can’t wait to be able to say goodbye to all the 3rd party kludgy external lists/groups features. I’m currently maintaining groups in Tweetdeck as well as a separate lists in the iPhone Simplytweet app. It will be a race to see which desktop and mobile apps release a lists capable versions. I can easily see myself jumping ship to another app that offers support first. I’m so excited and wait very anxiously for this to be released.

Next week from October 15th to the 17th I will be headed to Las Vegas to attend and cover BlogWorld Expo. I’m excited about this on several levels. In monitoring the buzz online leading up to the conference, I can see that a large number of folks that I follow and admire will be in attendance. I always look forward to connecting in person with the people I interact with online but rarely get to see.

There are quite a few panels that I’m looking forward to.  An obvious one is Lifestreaming & Your Business on Thursday the 15th at 1:30pm where Steve Rubel will no doubt be providing his knowledge and experience on how to utilize Lifestreaming tools and concepts effectively. Then on Friday at 11:30am the stars collide when so many speakers I enjoy will all be presenting at the same time. There’s Robert Scoble talking about social media changing news, Chris Pirillo discussing monetization methods for blogs, Louis Gray on technology and the real-time web, or Micah Baldwin and Jesse Stay on the wrong ways to use Twitter. I might be panel hopping to try and get some tidbits from each. There is plenty more I’m looking forward to but I’ll return with what I’ve found during and after the conference.

Then on October 27 & 28th the 140 Character Conference (known as 140Conf) makes its way to Los Angeles. This is a travelling conference that most recently appeared in New York and after Los Angeles it will be making its way to London.

Here’s how Jeff Pulver (its creator) describes it:

At the #140conf events, we look at twitter as a platform and as a language we speak. Over time it will neither be the only platform nor the only language. #140conf is not an event about  microblogging or the place where people share twitter “tips and techniques” but rather where we explore the effects of the real-time Internet on Business.

I will be speaking on day 1 with several some other people that share a passion for Lifestreaming much the way I do. They include Dan Honigman who inspired the Austin Statesman project and recently released a Lifestreaming white paper, Kevin Sablan whom I’ve watched leverage Lifestreaming and its tools to help tell stories and bring us news, and Mona Nomura who has effectively used Lifestreaming tools like FriendFeed, SweetCron, Twitter and others. I’m really looking forward to joining these three great people to both educate and provide several aspects of Lifestreaming.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Colin Purrington

Several events as of late have cause many folks to celebrate a resurgence in blogs. The events of FriendFeed being purchased by Facebook and the demise of Tr.im (although it was resurected) have everyone questioning their trust in storing data on services controlled by others. Chris Saad shouts that Blogs are back. I recently chimed in on the need to maintain blogs and providng reminders of others who have deemed blogging dead and shown us the future of blogging. I completely agree with Louis Gray, Robert Scoble and many others that our blogs should always be our main hub but they also need to evolve with the changes that have transpired with the advent of Social Media services and the real time web.

While I enjoy providing my Lifestream on services like FriendFeed and Facebook to engage and communicate around my items on those services, I also have a Lifestream at the same time on my personal blog. All my entries get stored neatly in my Wordpress database with the help of the wonderful Lifestram plugin. Along with hosting your own Lifestream on a blog there are tons of widgets available from social media sites that can help enhance your blog as well. Lastly, the use of a commenting service such as Disqus or Echo provide a method of aggregating all the discussions around your posts to be displayed on your blog. These are just a few high level examples of how you can evolve your blog. There are many other methods out there, with plenty more to come. You can get many great visualizations of how people are doing this today by visiting the galleries.

My favorite post on this subject though comes from Om Malik who wrote the aptly titled post “The Evolution of Blogging” where he provides much more context around this shift, why it needs to happen, and specifically mentions Lifestreaming.

From his post

What Facebook and FriendFeed have shown is that people want to consume and publish content in a more dynamic fashion — more in real time, so to speak.

I will quote from a previous post. “As a society, we are entering an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies…The evolution of blogging platforms needs to match these societal and demographic changes.” What I meant was that blogging platforms need to evolve from the hierarchical content-management systems of today to more fluid, free-flowing, more socially relevant and real-time lifestreaming systems.

It was nice to hear Om on TWiT last week where he discussed many of his thoughts from the blog post. You want to go to 57:13 of the podcast to hear him talk specifically about how blogging needs to evolve. I’m excited to see the emphasis go back to blogging platforms to enhance their features to take advantage of Lifestraeming and social services in new and meaningful ways. I look forward to watching this happen.

Image courtesy of Louis Gray
Its now been well over 24 hours since the initial shock that FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook. I’ve been watching all the reactions originating both by the coverage surrounding the deal as well as the user community on the FriendFeed site itself. It’s been a pretty surreal two days that have included a huge bag of reactions and emotions across the web. Here are my current thoughts on the situation.

I first joined FriendFeed in October of 2007 just weeks after they launched in private beta. I remember after my first visit not being very impressed with their initial release and quickly dismissing it as another one of the many new Lifestreaming services to launch at that time that didn’t really bring anything new to the table. That changed over just a few short months after and when I decided to create the Lifestreaming services comparison matrix in Feb of 2008 (I really need to update this) it had risen to become the most feature rich service out there.

It was also around this time that I started to become very active on the service. FriendFeed chose to pave a new path beyond solely being a Lifestreaming service. They quickly became a differentiating service when they decided to go down the SocialStream path and focus on creating conversations around the items that made up people’s Lifestreams. They did this by launching two features that would become their defining ones to achieve this. First they created a very quick and simple way to allow people to create comments on items. Then they changed the logic of just displaying a reverse chronological stream of items by introducing the “like” feature. As users of the service would click on the like button (or comment on them), that item would re-appear withing peoples streams. These two features (which were both subsequently copied and implemented by Facebook) are what propelled them to become a very powerful conversational platform that I feel has to this day not been matched in another service.

So fast forward to yesterday. I go to lunch and when I return saw a tweet (don’t rem from who) that said FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook. So the first thing I do is check the calendar and make sure it wasn’t 4/1 and then quickly start searching for more info. It didn’t take long to verify the news. I was shocked. My mind started to wander about what this would mean for the FriendFeed sites’ future and I immediately didn’t feel it would be good. I started to feel a bit numb. I had never invested the amount of time and passion in a web service as I have with FriendFeed. For me it has been the human component and friendships I have made on the the service that has made it so great. FriendFeed lowered the barrier of communication so as to make it easy to interact with many of the web’s technorati. It was FriendFeed that provided me the ability to trade dialog and befriend them along with so many other great people in a way that I haven’t been able to anywhere else. The thought of this going away has definitely caused some anguish.

The future of FriendFeed is still uncertain but from a telling paragraph in the interview by TechCrunch as well as the post over at Inquisitr, it would appear that the chances of the site continuing are slim. Yesterday Paul Bucheit stated that he’d do the best he can to ensure that the community is treated right and I believe he will. But he also acknowledged his personal limitations in stating that he can’t make any promises on other’s behalf. I pointed out in Paul’s thread a few things that I’d like to see. This included the ability to export our data as well as a tool to import our friends to Facebook. I also voiced my concern regarding the state of their in-house ff.im short url serviced used for links posted through the service. No word yet on any of these.

So today after much of the raw emotion started to subside and the reality of the situation started to settle in people on FriendFeed started talking about alternatives as well as other options. ReadWriteWeb did a fantastic job today on this topic. First Sarah Perez identified Streamy.com as a possible new destination, then Marshall Kirkpatrick writes an eye-opening piece on whether now is the time for the creation of a distributed social network.

Both of these were big topics on FriendFeed today. Many started talking about and trying out Streamy. Apparently so many users started testing the service that Ben Parr discussed that it buckled for a little while under the pressure. I like what Streamy has done recently to re-invent itself but they have a difficult decision to make regarding whether to tweak their service in hopes of acommodating the potential FriendFeed user base or continue with their planned initiative prior to today’s limelight. I’m friends with Don Mosites who is one of their founders and I will no doubt be talking to him about this as well as previous features I’ve been pushing him to implement which aren’t related to FriendFeed.

I love the idea put out by Marshall regarding a distributed social network but feel that the barriers to entry for such a service are pretty high. Activity Streams, DiSO, and Data Portability are all fine initiatives but they have been plodding along at a slow pace and I don’t believe that they are being held back by technical issues but  by beauracratic business obstacles instead which are much harder to overcome. There seems to be some headway being made however from what I’ve read recently about them and perhaps the FriendFeed situation will provide some help to further these along. One other interesting possibility was suggested by Mark Rizzn in a post where he posits whether Wordpress could create an alternative replacement as well.

On FriendFeed there have also been conversations about building an open distributed service as well. I have even joined these conversations and pointed them to the collection of scripts and other open source Lifestreaming tools that I have found over the last 2 years, but I don’t think that most of the FriendFeed users will wait for this to come to fruition and will likely find a new place to call home before this could become a reality.

Many podcasters scrambled yesterday to record impromptu shows surrounding the FriendFeed acquisition. I don’t recall any other site purchases ever causing such a large amount of people to want to react so quickly. One of the best ones I heard was the Social Geeks Podcast which included Louis Gray, Wayne Sutton, Jeff Smith, Corvida, Sarah Perez, and Chris Miller (aka IdoNotes) all of whom are very active FriendFeed users so their thoughts and perspective were especially enlightening. One things that I had been thinking about personally and had my own thoughts on was why did FriendFeed sell? They repeatedly stated that they had no interest in selling or cashing out whenever they were interviewed and I believed that. I think Louis nailed it on this podcast (covered starting at 28:40) when he stated that the writing was on the wall with both the eminent release of Google Wave along with the continual copycat advancements made by Facebook. So it would appear that the sale was more due to concerns with their viability in the future and wanting to make a successful exit while they were still on top.

Dave Winer and Marshall Kirkpatrick also recorded their Bad Har Day podcast where they took in calls to discuss people’s reactions. Dave also wrote a very interesting post spurred by the podcast here. Lastly the fan created FFundercats podcast (not online yet) recorded their very emotional reactions to the news and were also joined by Louis Gray.

One thing I’m pretty happy about is the fact that I chose to use the excellent Wordpress Lifestream plugin (also the author is working on a new Lifestreaming service to launch soon at Lifestrm.com) for my personal Lifestream on my blog. By using this plugin I store all of my Lifestream data in my Wordpress database ensuring that I own and don’t lose any of that data. And speaking of data, I reached out to Rob May who is the founder of Lifestream Backup to find out if they currently supported FriendFeed. He told me that they currently didn’t but had been getting a large number of requests to do so. So today he wrote a post looking to see how strong the interest is and to see if it would move to the top of the feature priority list.

Since I’m on the topic of blogs, I’ve also been paying attention to Chris Saad and his recent post on Blogs are Back is very interesting. The advancement in so many tools including Echo pose another strong possibility that many people may consider reverting back to their blogs and utilizing the power of these tools for the conversation.

So where do I stand? Well FriendFeed is still up and running and chances are that I’ll continue to use the service until the last server is shut down. That being said, I am definitely keeping my eyes open for other possible options but at this point in a very strange way I almost feel relieved and ready to submit to the almighty Facebook primarily because its been challenging having to participate on an extra service and being able to consolidate that makes my workflow much easier. I know crazy talk and I might change my mind tomorrow but I do feel that way a bit right now. The one wildcard for me at this point that I’m really looking forward to is Google Wave. The buzz around it seems amazing, and I’m impressed by what I’ve been able to see. If anyone can get me an early invite please send it over as I’d like to see what all the fuss is about and see if it lives up to the hype.