Overall it does feel weird but I think given a bit of time I’ll like the new layout. It has emphasised Amazon’s shift to things other than books, which had been obvious by the number of tabs that kept having to be added in the old website. What I would really like is a customizable front page that lets me see the type of items I buy at Amazon now (yes I mean books. )

The one addon that I could not do without was delicious from Yahoo who finally released a version for Firefox 3 a few days ago. The delicious addon allows me 2 crucial things:

First I can see all my bookmarks in the browser, replacing (or co-existing with) firefox’s own bookmarks. This means that I can search delicious and go to my bookmarks without going to the delicious website and then searching. Removing that single step turned me from a rare delicious user into one that uses it almost daily.

The second is that it allows me to add sites I want to bookmark at the click of a button, in a similar way to you would normally inside a browser. Again, this saves me having to go to the delicious website and adding it there. During this step I can also share the link with my friends or choose to make the link private and not visible in my delicious profile.

There has been a huge delay to delicious rolling out the Firefox 3 addon. It has taken them months. But, and this amazed me, none of the other online bookmarking services seemed to have the same level of integration with Firefox. They all offered me the second ability to add bookmarks to their service but none allowed me the first - letting me view them inside within Firefox. Over the course of recent months, I could have switched to Google Bookmarks or Magnolia without any regrets if they had let me have this functionality, especially Magnolia. I really like their site (though of course with the integration I’d be unlikely to ever go there!).

On a side note this is the sort of connected services that I think is going to really take off in the future. Not sure yet how you make money from it though. Maybe by paying a fee to use the addon in the browser? Or the more traditional web route of suggesting other paid for links similar to the one you are bookmarking at the time of saving it. Something akin to Sphere which I am using at the end of posts to suggest similar links.

Theoretically the idea is sound though if looked at in a different context - different cultures like (or search for) different things. That’s why they have different cultures, how bland it would be if we all wanted the same things! It’s natural that someone with a certain culture would use a search engine that is tailored to them - not because of their skin colour but because it finds them the results they want. Of course, it is a bit chicken and egg.. the service was designed for a certain community which you might be able to differentiate by skin colour, and yet it meets that community’s requirements. It may not be ethically a good thing differentiating software on skin colour but African-Americans (in this case) would be happier I bet to use a search engine which finds them what they want rather than have to search through Google.

That was the reason I left Altavista for Google in the first place.

I think over time though this specific search engine is irrelevent - Google (and the other major search players out there) will highly likely introduce profiles that tailor it’s results based on you (equally I would hope you could switch this off if you did not want Google to know that much about you).

My short answer, was not right now. Here is the more longwinded answer!

Firstly, life stream aggregators vs standard social networking. Let’s list some of each to start with:

Standard Social Networks:
1. Facebook
2. Bebo
3. MySpace

Life Stream Aggregators
1. FriendFeed
2. Tumblr
3. Social Thing

If you look at the standard social networks they all offer pretty much the same thing with different emphases (MySpace was music, Facebook was connecting with friends). Here are some of the things they offer:

1. Ability to connect to friends
2. Photos
3. Public (and private) messaging
4. Status updates
5. News feed of events (usually) done by your friends.

Amongst Internetphiles, people have been moving more and more away from Facebook and towards individual specialised services and until recently there has been nothing to bring it all together.

Life stream Aggregators brings many of the different items (and more) listed above into one feed for all your friends across the web and across services. The real problem is one of scale.

It has one single feed and treats everyone the same. The feed gives so much information that you can never keep up with everything - and worse most of the information is not relevant. It suffers from the same issue as Twitter - if you follow too many people you lose the value of the service. What is needed is a way of saying I want to see in my main feed photos, news, mutterings from Group X, and only shared items and posts from Group Y. Even better I want to be able to have multiple feeds. Once this starts to happen, this could become a great tool to manage your attention data (ie see what you need to see at the right time).

In the meantime, if you are using specialised online services such as Twitter, Flickr, You Tube, Seesmic etc it is worthwhile keeping an eye on life stream aggregators (especially Friendfeed and Tumblr) and even worth trying with a small group of close friends.

On a separate note - I wonder when email will get integrated into this stream..

Some key takeaways - according to Spamhaus more than 90% of email is spam BT, Bulldog, Wanadoo and Tiscali are failing to tackle the problem of botnets (spam sent from ordinary household computers that have been hijacked by hackers).

I’m not sure whether it is an omission or whether the 2nd and 3rd largets ISPs (Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse) in the UK are doing a better job of dealing with this.

The conference overall was good - I liked the interactivity of the sessions rather than the more usual presentations delivered usually - it is nothing like the interaction present in tech/web 2.0 conferences though - but then this is a much less tech orientated crowd - it was mostly brand or internet marketers present. In fact, I never even saw an open laptop during any of the sessions.

The session I was looking forward to, and most related to this blog, was the Web 2.0 session presented by Will Mcinnes (I am 99% certain he will visit this site again if he practises what he preaches and tracks his “ego” online!). These sorts of sessions are again completely different to the web 2.0 conferences. I asked a question regarding Twitter and how brands should look to get involved. I don’t think he really answered my question - mainly because not many had even heard of Twitter yet - even my geek savvy Account Manager had not heard of it as (though I sense she will be using it shortly) - I imagine this would almost be sacrilege in a web 2.0 conference these days! In any case, the session lived up to expectations and I thought he got across the concepts of “buzz marketing” and “sentiment analysis” and the idea of having a conversation with your audience which I believe is the way forward. Of couse to have a conversation you have to listen..

So one of the tools he mentioned was Brandwatch which I am assuming are these guys. They look interesting, and seemed to be able to show where conversations involving your brand are taking place. It is certainly a good place to start. Nielsen Buzz Metrics is a similar tool - I have used Nielson’s BlogPulse in the past to track conversations online and found it to be a useful free tool, though Will mentioned that Nielsen’s Buzz Metrics is paid for. Google Alerts is an even easier starting point to track your brand online, though possibly more time consuming.

Anyway, I don’t want to regurgitate the whole session again here - I recommend you head over to either Will’s blog or his company website for more info.

One problem.

It did not differentiate between those that already have a Messenger account; those that I am already connected to and everyone else.

Basically I have to spam all my friends asking them to sign up for Live Messenger, surely Microsoft can check who has a valid account or not? I am ignoring the fact my friends could be using Yahoo Messenger (whom I can also connect to using Live Messenger) - as I assume Yahoo will not let Microsoft check for a valid account.

Another major issue, is that it also only pulls in my main email address from Facebook - not my Live messenger account which I have filled out in my profile so anyone using this would connect to me using the wrong account anyway.

Oh dear.

Louis Gray believes that friendfeed should win because of one key feature - its ability to build a community or network by allowing users to comment on items posted inside friendfeed.

Muhammad Saleem believes that SocialThing’s ability to allow users to comment outside socialthing inside the external service is the better solution.

I have not yet seen SocialThing (it is in private beta) - but it strikes me that SocialThing’s methodology is the way to do things provided you can still see the conversation inside socialthing.

Of course, Duncan Riley of Techcrunch thought that Friendfeed is just another lifestream aggregator (compared to Plaxo Pulse, Tumblr, Spokeo, Second Brain, SocialThing and Iminta) and that why would you even want to republish Twitter and Google Reader shared items. Can’t you just go to their sites?

I think right now they are all much of a muchness in comparison with each other. Friendfeed does have the ability to connect to 30 other services online and a huge following, SocialThing has a lot less services and even less of a following. I completely disagree with Duncan on the lack of need to republish.

My view is that these lifestream aggregators have huge potential for consumer benefit online. It could become the platform for web services, allowing users to choose their favourite photo/video/blog/whatever provider whilst not forcing their friends to sign up or worse visit lots of different sites to see them all. Duncan makes a valid point though about Twitter, its very nature means it takes up a huge portion of the overall feed. What I would like to see is the ability to separate items into different areas so I can follow people’s Twitters in one area, photos in another and blog posts/interesting items somewhere else. ie customizability of the lifestream.

Some thoughts on Friendfeed coming up shortly..