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I wrote a quick post to Google Buzz recently that dealt with a concept and issue that’s been rattling in the back of my mind lately. We consume so much information from so many sources that we’re bound to run into the same stories. The news that becomes popular does so because of it being shared, telling friends, sending it to others, and spreading the word.

Virality is the term that’s been associated with this for some time. Getting things to “go viral” is a key to success, but the value of any story is its exclusivity, or who publishes it first. The above concept image is a visualization of my thoughts on how this issue might be dealt with.

I call it – Flume.

1. flume – noun. - A narrow gorge, usually with a stream flowing through it.

The goal is to group all similar information from throughout the web, from social networks and from all of your friends, and distill it to just the original sources.

You’d have a list of news stories that are by default presented by popularity. Each story would get a score that represents how often it’s cited across the web – based on tweets and retweets from Twitter, inbound links from reactionary blog posts, and personal status update reactions from friends and colleagues on social networks like Facebook and Google Buzz. The presentation would be consistent regardless of the source, with simple links to click and visit any story in detail. You’d have at-a-glance, with no interaction needed from the user, an importance-ranked delivery of information stemming from the people and content sources they value most.

Behind the scenes, the application would detect when a story all points to the same common news event, and instead of you having to look elsewhere through your various feeds, walls, streams, etc., the story would show up only as a single source origin story – all within the confines of one application.

For example, if CNN gets the story first, that’s the one that would show up in Flume. All other stories that were posted anywhere on the web afterwards would be consolidated underneath it. Anyone posting about it on Twitter – hidden. Anything on Facebook about it – not seen. All of the reactions would fall in a toggleable area below each story, where if you desired to drill down into to see what people are saying, you’d know from where it came from and where it was being talked about. But only if you want to.

So how would it work?

You’d use a combination of keyword density, trackback links, un-shortened URL detection, and possibly the Salmon protocol to algorithmically distinguish the content streaming in as either original or reactionary. As more content arrives, whichever source has the content origin first gets the credit. So if your friend on Twitter was the first to post about a story before it arrived to you via someone else on Facebook, you’d only see the tweet. If the blog post came before the Buzz, you’d get the blog post alone.

The mockup design is obviously heavily influenced by TweetDeck. Where the multicolumn view works in TweetDeck’s favor, I’d like to take all the separated information and throw out anything other than the first place something appeared. Rather than having separate columns for each service, I’d want a single column for all news, regardless of source. If you wanted to of course, you could always re-sort it by source if you desired.

It’s a bit like Google Buzz or FriendFeed, where you have a single aggregated stream of information, but instead of being source-centric, the default is popularity centric. It’s throwing TweetDeck, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Facebook, Brizzly, Redux, Amplify, Google Reader, and countless other web tools into a blender to create an ultimate single point-of-entry news reading mechanism.

HTML5 and web application standards would be ideal for the client to allow for both desktop and cross-platform mobile usage, while a robust database application layer in the cloud would be constantly evaluating and delivering the ranked information requested by the client.

What do you think? Would a single view of content without the same stories popping up over and over interest you? What other features would you expect to see in this application? What are some of the limitations that would prevent an application like this from existing, and how might they be overcome?

Since FriendFeed’s launch of a new still-in-beta redesign, there’s been much debate over some of the features and style changes – both on blogs, and within the service itself. While any change is sometimes met with reluctance and skepticism, as Facebook has realized with their latest changes, there’s a number of reasons why the aesthetic and functional revamps of FriendFeed are helpful for both its users, and for the proliferation of real-time data on the web. Here’s a breakdown of why I believe FriendFeed has made a lot of correct choices in their transition from data aggregation, to a broad conversational hub for the web.

1. Perceptual Familiarity

Since FriendFeed has a complex amount of data to display, attraction of users unfamiliar to the service proves to be difficult for many casual web users. One of the primary reasons other social networks such as Twitter or Facebook have garnered buzz and widespread adoption are because of their ease of entry, and narrower focus.

What makes Twitter and Facebook‘s interfaces work – showcasing the people that we connect with through the use of avatars – are how we’re used to seeing content displayed. The new inline visual cue from the content’s creator, via an avatar image, goes a long way to breed familiarity and a sense of “I understand this already” for new users. Along with simpler things – rounded edges to the interface, even column distribution between navigation and content – all create a sense of uniformity with services elsewhere – which allows users to spend more time communicating and sharing and less time trying to understand the mechanics to do it.

2. Real-Time

The ability to have instant discussion about topics across the web is becoming increasingly important to stay relevant in the ever-increasing pace of the flow of news. FriendFeed’s decision to make real-time the standard has propelled the discussion of stories to be faster than even Twitter can react. With a broader userbase, story reaction through immediate discussion on FriendFeed could allow them to become the main source of the absolute earliest debate and dissection of content funneling from the web.

3. Simplification

The removal of service icons (the graphical representations of the content’s source) in the new FriendFeed helps to eliminate distraction from viewing the content itself. Ultimately, if you see a picture from your friend, does it matter whether it came from Flickr, Smugmug, or Picasa? Why should it?

Eliminating the distinction between Groups & Feeds also aids the initial comprehension of content management that sometimes confuses users at first. While I do think there’s still considerable room for further term elimination (groups, feeds, filters, friends, subscriptions – there’s just too many), the infrastructure is arriving at a simpler solution to visualize a myriad collection of content.

4. Advanced Search

The new “Filters” of FriendFeed offer a way to save complex searches, which allows for a level of data mining never before available. The following of trends, brands, story topics, and people has never been simpler – or with as much variable control. The simple, but powerful, form-based searches in the new FriendFeed often make for an even more accurate result than even Google or Yahoo can deliver.

5. Communication

While direct messaging has been a staple of other services, FriendFeed’s new implementation takes the concept even farther by allowing for simultaneous broadcast and private messaging. Being able to send content to individuals, or groups of friends on the new FriendFeed, now effectively creates an instant, private, and real-time discussion thread. This is an unprecedented level of immediate discussion. Within seconds, users can be debating the river of information as it flows from the many sources worldwide – in a centralized location. Where reading RSS feeds, or content on blogs or other websites fail to offer the ability to announce a timely, reactive viewpoint, FriendFeed delivers the most spirited, instant reaction on the web – without reloads, comment verifications, captchas, and all of the other barriers that other sites present.

Among all of the advancements, there are still more elements of FriendFeed that require sharpening and refinement, such as:

• better user management that allows for sorting your friends by level of engagement
• clearer and immediate notification of direct replies within comment threads
• and naming systems that are intuitive, and accurate for the various views that FriendFeed offers (“My discussions” for example should not include posts that I’ve never commented on)

Since the site is still being actively refined during the beta process, now is the time to make your voice known of the things you want that aren’t yet present, and the things that are being done right. With an increase in user participation, the developers of FriendFeed have an opportunity to create the largest vehicle of content discussion and dissemination in the world.

Most who use Twitter casually are interested in simply posting their daily exploits for their close friends. Recently the trend to use Twitter for everything from news sharing, to professional networking, to business promotion, is becoming more prevalent as the service’s userbase continues to grow rapidly. As I’ve branched out with my own personal uses of Twitter, I’ve found employing the use of some third-party created tools and applications can help to better manage your relationships, and make Twitter work wisely for a myriad of purposes. Let’s take a look at some of the most helpful of these implementations and see what they offer to all of us working to get the most out of Twitter.

On The Desktop

Digsby has captured a huge segment of the IM market away from other multi-provider clients like Trillian, not only for its instant messaging capabilities, but also for its foray into hooking into social networking. In addition to support for Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, Digsby also has a very capable Twitter client built-in.

Right from your taskbar, you can access your timeline, @ replies, direct messages, archive, and favorites. You can also easily reply, direct message, and mark any tweet as a favorite – in addition to visible posting times, profile images, and indications of which service was used to post the update. You can also use

Digsby’s real-time notifications as your friend’s updates come in. Posting an update also offers integrated TinyURL support, and a character count to keep your posts under the 140 limit. For the Twitter pros, Digsby even supports multiple simultaneous Twitter accounts, so you can keep track of all of your followers on each of your accounts.

You can follow them at http://twitter.com/digsby.

TweetDeck, plain and simple, is the new dashboard for the power Twitter user.  Using a powerful customizable column format, this Adobe AIR application lets you quickly view any combination of the people you follow on Twitter.  Your columns can include your @replies, favorites, direct messages, and any number of special groupings of your Twitter friends. One of the most useful features that TweetDeck offers is the ablity to filter any of your columns by keyword, focusing in on the subject matter you’re most interested in. You can also use TweetDeck similar to a news reader, where you can mark tweets as seen, clear seen tweets, and clear all tweets to get rid of items you’ve already read from your view.

Using the Groups feature, you can split your friends up into clusters of your choosing: people you know in real life, people whom you interact with more often, people who’ve sent you @replies  - and show them in their own column. You can also set up columns for search terms – perfect for finding mention of keywords or brands you’re interested to keep close tabs on. For those that are also 12seconds.tv users, TweetDeck lets you keep track of postings there as well. Posting offers a slew of URL shorteners, TwitPic attachment, and inline TweetShrink – for those posts that you can’t seem to get under 140 characters. Even though TweetDeck is currently in beta, it’s an extremely full-featured application for anyone looking to squeeze the most out of Twitter.

You can follow them at http://twitter.com/tweetdeck.

On The Web

If you ever wanted to spread news about your brand, or find people that are particularly interested in specific topics, Twollow does a great job of auto-following people based on keywords. The free web application allows 5 unique keywords to be followed per Twitter account (up to 15 if you go for their premium service), and tells you who the application recently followed for you. It’s a great app if you’d like to have some automation of finding and adding new people to follow.

Another similar service, currently in private beta, is Tweet Manager.

You can follow them at: http://twitter.com/twollow.

TweetLater provides the most Twitter automation of any web tool: auto thank-yous both public and private to those who follow you, receive digest emails of those that @ reply to you, track keywords and receive digest emails of tweets that match, schedule tweets to appear at a later time, or even distribute your tweets at regular intervals over time. For anyone that is spending a lot of time cultivating a brand on Twitter, TweetLater serves up an impressive arsenal of services.

You can follow them at: http://twitter.com/tweetlater.

For the Twitter users that are looking to rid themselves of the non-participants among their ranks, MyCleenr is about as simple a solution as it gets. You’re shown a list of all of the inactive people you follow, sorted by the date of their last tweet. Want to delete that person who hasn’t tweeted in months? Click Delete, and they’re gone. MyCleenr is a quick and well presented service to ensure the people you follow are all ones who remember to post, and post often.

You can follow them at: http://twitter.com/mycleenr.

Twitter Karma picks up where MyCleenr stops with additional information to help decide who you should or shouldn’t be following. In addition to showing you when they last updated, you can sort alphabetically, by your followers and those you follow, or those who are mutual friends. You can use these lists to perform bulk follows, unfollows, or blocks. Twitter Karma is ideal for aiding you in your search to determine who you want to keep, or end, your relationships with.

You can follow them at: http://twitter.com/karma_news.

If you’re unable to use TweetDeck, TweetVisor is a fantastic web dashboard to monitor all that’s going on with your Twitter accounts. An auto-refreshing portal of your friends’ tweets, your @ replies, your direct messages, any of your updates that have been retweeted, form and monitor groups of people you follow, and follow your own personalized “hot topics” allow you to keep everything visible quickly on one interface. As a browser-based offering, there’s nothing as complete as TweetVisor’s all-in-one package.

You can follow them at: http://twitter.com/tweetvisor.

On The iPhone

Tweetie is a new Twitter client for iPhone that offers more than any other client currently available on the handheld. In addition to the standard abilities one would expect, Tweetie brings some of the best desktop features, and features from its competitors, to a mobile device.

Like Digsby, Tweetie supports multiple Twitter accounts, so you can keep up with all of your friends across your various profiles. Taking a cue from the original star iPhone client, Twinkle, Tweetie can show you all of the nearby Twitter posts in your local area. If you’re used to being able to find posts that include unique keywords, Tweetie has you covered with its search functionality. Lastly, Tweetie tracks the latest trends, similar to TweetDeck, to keep you up to speed on the latest events hitting the Twittersphere.

You can follow them at: http://twitter.com/tweetie.

For The Future

There are still some features that would be nice to have for really drilling down into your relationships, getting more from your friends’ updates, and maintaining the quality of who you choose to follow. I’d like to see offerings that allow you to:

• View friends/followers by their Twitter Ratio, to determine if they are actually spammers or might have otherwise unwanted peculiarities
• Auto-pull all links from people you are following, and display them to you as a “best of day” in order of popularity
• Create integrated links: so rather than having to use URL shortening services, the link should be inline with the text, just like a normal web link (Note: This is more an issue of Twitter’s than of a third party enabling such a feature.)

As always, I hope this is the start of a discussion on how we can all use Twitter efficiently and effectively. Please contribute with your own findings and techniques, and feel free to follow me at http://twitter.com/nathanchase, and let me know what you think.

My wife and I welcomed our new son, Cameron Alan Chase, into the world on Tuesday, July 29th at 8:24pm. Thanks to the aid of several web-based applications, we were able to quickly announce to the world our exciting news in a lot of really effective ways. For other parents-to-be, here’s a quick guide to the fantastic services we used to share our excitement:

One of the most time-consuming tasks right after Cameron was born was trying to get in touch with all of our many friends and family to tell them the good news. Phonevite made this process a breeze by letting us record a message by phone right there in the delivery room. With our preset lists of people to call, including phone numbers and email addresses, Phonevite called and emailed them with our message. The other excellent feature was during the call, everyone’s phones showed the call as coming from us, rather than an unknown number from some company. Phonevite played the message immediately, and then played a brief identification tag at the end saying it was sent via Phonevite.

We set up several lists before we even went to the hospital with one for our immediate family, extended family, Krissy’s friends, my friends, and our work colleagues. We were able to instantly reach 54 people within minutes of Cameron’s birth with a single personalized call. Phonevite‘s website also verified which calls were successful and which didn’t go through for any reason, in case we needed to follow up once we returned home.

Phonevite‘s service has a lot of unique uses, but we saw the appeal immediately for how quick and easy it made informing everyone of Cameron’s arrival.

Brightkite‘s location services let us inform folks exactly when we arrived at the hospital, and when we returned back home using their Placemarks feature. There was even one kind soul who didn’t even know us that viewed our associated status updates of Cameron’s birth. They wished us an anonymous congratulations via Brightkite, which we received on my iPhone via SMS text message.

Since I’ve had so much luck using status updates to document our trips, it seemed natural to use the same method to record Krissy’s progress during Cameron’s labor and delivery. Although some of the multi-site updating services I mentioned previously are still excellent options, the relatively new, still-in-beta service, Ping.fm, offers even more sites to update simultaneously than it’s current competition. Ping.fm kept our friends on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Brightkite, and Identi.ca all in the loop on Krissy’s progress, all the way through the delivery.

With the iPhone’s built-in camera, we were able to immediately take some great photos of Mom, Dad, and Cameron. In order to get those photos to where friends and family could see them right away, we used the ShoZu iPhone app to automatically upload them to our Flickr account where the world could see. It took only seconds from the time we took the photos until they were up and available for everyone to view. ShoZu supports a myriad selection of websites to post to as well, so if you aren’t a Flickr user, you’re sure to find your favorite place to post your newborn photos.

Now that Cameron’s here, we wanted a way to publish all of the photos, news, updates, and firsts to our family and friends in one place. TotSpot is essentially a blog for our baby; with the ability to post Cameron’s firsts, share his photos and videos, write daily journals, and lots of other fun things all on a single, easy to update interface. There’s no understanding of web design or HTML needed – everything is laid out intuitively and makes it a snap to update everyone on Cameron’s daily changes and activities. TotSpot is still in beta, but already has a lot of functionality that makes it much simpler than trying to configure a WordPress or Blogger blog to house all of the baby-centric news. Krissy and I can both update his profile, and changes get emailed to all of Cameron’s friends and family instantly.

It’s A New World For Parents

Without all of these great services, we would have had to wait until after we left the hospital and made it back home before we could send all the news and updates to everyone. Now that there are companies providing these services that utilize our new smartphones and mobile phones like the Apple iPhone, increasingly portable laptops, and the web, there’s no reason to not take full advantage of them and let the world know of your new arrival.

Now that music has become mostly a commodity in the minds of consumers, music industry companies are having to think of new solutions in order to stay relevant and profitable. While they struggle to figure out how to reach those consumers, companies like Last.fm, Pandora, and Slacker are exploring today’s real innovation in music – customized and personalized listening experiences.

While all three services offer their own unique implementations of online radio, there are a number of ways that each solution trumps the rest in features and user experience. Let’s dive in to a comparison and find out what makes these services so slick:

Based out of the U.K., and now owned by CBS, Last.fm is the leader of online customized radio. No other service has the sheer volume of features, tracking and statistics that Last.fm offers. From listening to stations comprised of your “neighborhood” of like-minded users, to forming listening groups around artists or any custom topic, to just listening to your loved tracks when you spring for their premium service – there’s a wealth of options to enjoy your music. They also offer event tracking and music videos to coincide with your library of artists which acts as a nice extension to their core radio service. Where the site really shines is with its tagging system; enabling you to categorize songs and artists in a uniquely defined way, and listen to custom stations incorporating them. Last.fm’s other features include a robust new API, a recently launched revamp of the site’s user interface, and an excellent Apple iPhone application for streaming your radio stations on the go. In addition, Last.fm recently offered unsigned musicians to place their material on the service and receive royalties – a feature only they can boast.

Last.fm still has room for improvement however, with a glaring lack of a pause button being the obvious, badly needed missing feature. The official answer on this is due to licensing restrictions, so it might never see the light of day. But it seems odd that all of the other services can offer a pause function, and last.fm mysteriously can’t. Ultimately, there’s plenty of opportunity for growth within Last.fm to become the definitive online music listening destination.

Steve Krause said it best when he described Pandora as the “nature” to Last.fm’s “nurture”. Pandora’s “Music Genome Project” takes apart the musical qualities of songs and uses things like the key, the tone, and instrumental combinations to define similarities between tracks. This showcases a stark contrast to last.fm’s more basic method of just comparing all users’ tastes to deliver your recommendations. Pandora’s playlists often end up offering a more aesthetically pleasing radio experience due to this hand-picked nature of determining musical similarities.

Pandora’s ability to play music you choose, versus music similar to what you choose, doesn’t quite hold up to the other services, but for what it does offer it does a remarkable job – showcasing lesser known acts, keeping the “mood” of a station intact, and offering well shuffled QuickMixes of all of your custom stations.

Pandora has also leaped ahead in the mobile space, with an impressive number of supported cell phones, including their flagship Apple iPhone application that mimics the iPod experience almost exactly, adding the many features of Pandora on top.

Slacker is the newest kid on the block, and brings along some impressive abilities of its own. Unlike the other services, Slacker does offer you the chance to have radio stations of ONLY the artists you tell it to play, at no additional cost. They also have a premium service, that will let you play any song, any time, and eliminate the occasional station promo spots. There are some nicely designed ready-made genre stations that you can also adjust to your preferences if you’re not completely happy with the DJ compiled playlists.

Slacker’s ability to “FineTune” your custom radio stations offers a world of tweaking to make excellent stations. You can tweak how new the material is, how popular, how much you want to hear your loved tracks; it’s really empowering to have so much control over the music stream.

In addition to their free web player, they have both a desktop application for PC, and a portable device that mimics the online experience. Now that Pandora and Last.fm offer iPhone applications, Slacker’s portable device has less draw, but this could be fixed quickly if Slacker created their own app for the iPhone listeners.

I would also like to give an honorable mention to Yahoo’s Launchcast, which used to be the only game in town circa 1999 for personalized radio. I’ve been listening to online radio in various ways over the years, and although Launchcast was once the best option, these days it suffers from too many drawbacks to recommend… For example:

• it doesn’t work on a Mac (unless you’re on Parallels/Fusion)
• it only works in Internet Explorer (although you can use IETab as a workaround)
• you can’t track or share your listening habits/statistics (LaunchScrobbler seems to be now defunct)
• you can’t skip songs
• the sound is in mono, and low quality
• very limited number of songs
• frequent radio ads
• unstable situation within Yahoo Music’s management

Some of these limitations are lifted if you spring for the $3-$4 a month for LaunchCast Plus which gives you:

• high quality stereo sound quality
• unlimited skipping, and artist/song access
• more personalization via “moods” and “influencers“

Ways To Combine Services

There are also a few options to track your listening on Pandora and Slacker on last.fm. Use:

• PandoraFM (for tracking Pandora to last.fm)
• LastSlacker (for tracking Slacker to last.fm)

Final Thoughts

With my testing of all three services, I’ve found that:

• last.fm is best for:
  • listening tracking
  • stations by “tag”
  • and community features
• Pandora is best for:
  • user interface
  • “mood” stations
  • and mobile device streaming
• Slacker is best for:
  • music discovery
  • custom genre stations
  • and truly customized radio
    

I have high hopes that perhaps the minds of these companies will meet at some point to come to a combined ultimate solution which really meets the needs of consumers. Taste in music is so unique, but there must be a better way to zero in on what makes it that way, and how best to deliver exactly what avid music listeners want to hear, when they want to hear it.

I’m also interested to hear how you’ve used these services. and which of them meet your music listening needs, so please, add your comments below.

I recently started a Twitter discussion with Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks on the relevance and usefulness of the <small> tag. I’ve had this same debate with co-workers on why one would still use <small> over just using a <p> or <span> with an appropriate <class> or <id> to define the “smallness” of the tag. The one thing we both noticed is that no one uses the <big> tag anymore, so why should anyone use the <small> tag? This seems to be only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to determining which element to use for an intended result. Let’s look at a few more instances of controversy in the realm of standards and semantics on the web.

Strong or Bold? How Do You Like Your Emphasis?

Another debate is why we now use <strong> and <em> for bold and italics over just using <b> and <i>. Is there a true reason for why we as web designers have made this transition? None of these tags are deprecated (according to the W3C), so why have these presentational tags gone by the wayside?

I suppose it becomes a matter of semantics, which leads to the current buzz term in web design – the semantic web. The W3C does state that even though these tags are not deprecated, their use is discouraged in favor of style sheets. My good friend, Eric Filson, takes this approach and never uses any presentational markup for text (no <strong>, <em>, <b>, or <i> ) but rather wraps the element in a <span> and applies the appropriate CSS (such as font-weight: bold or font-style: italic) instead.

An old forum thread on Webmaster World dives into this struggle with some helpful clarification:

When setting a bold or italic font for purposes of typography only, use <b> and <i>. If there’s a word or phrase that you want to emphasize as you would while speaking, then – and only then – use <strong> or <em>.

I’m fairly certain however that many designers don’t take this approach. When you look at industry standard editors like Dreamweaver or Expression Web, there are exclusive selectable options defaulted to “use <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>” – so there’s an obvious push from the top down as well to essentially deprecate those tags for designers to begin with.

When an <address> Isn’t an Address

Microformats adopters have given some focused attention to the rarely used <address> tag lately since the markup of adr relies heavily on adding address information to a page. One would assume that using the one tag in the HTML spec that seems perfect, <address>, seems obvious. In fact, <address> is almost never the right choice. The adr-examples wiki sets the story straight:

The <address> element is typically very confusing for web authors and is best avoided.

The <address> element does NOT mean what you might think it means (unless you are one of the few folks who has thoroughly read the HTML 4.01 recommendation.

The <address> element does NOT mean “address”.

The hcard-faq also goes into further explanation to say:

The poorly named <address> element really means <contact-info-for-this-web-page>. The HTML4 definition of the ADDRESS element says it is used “to supply contact information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form.” Therefore, <address> should be used ONLY IF it represents the contact information for the page or major part thereof. In short, DO NOT use <address> to markup physical/street/mailing addresses. Only use it to markup the contact information for the page.

So the moral of the story here is apparently we shouldn’t be using <address> anymore because it’s just too confusing. But if you’re going to use it, it’s basically achieving the same thing <meta name="author"> is for, but in a block of text somewhere within the body of your page. What a piece of junk <address> turned out to be!

The Future Of The Web

So with all of that said – what do your markups look like? Will you roll along with whatever works for you, or will you jump through hoops to markup your code semantically and get on the “Web 3.0” bandwagon? Are your sites going to be ready for the bleeding edge of microformats, RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL and WPT? Will any of this matter to paying clients? (strong emphasis!)

Come to think of it – maybe I should have used <acronym> on all of those…

Ever wished you had one place to test your web designs in all browsers easily? Well thanks to IETester, it’s now possible to check your work in IE 6, IE 7, IE 8 Beta (and even IE 5.5 for anyone still living in the year 2000). It’s still in alpha, so it has occasional crashes, hiccups, and limited browsing functions. In spite of this, the app in its current release is already incredibly useful. The developer has a forum set up for feedback and bug reporting as well which should hopefully keep the project moving forward.

With IETester combined with VMWare Fusion, I can now test my work on my Intel Mac in Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox without having to resort to remoting to other machines, using slower web-based visual checks, or using Virtual PC to test multiple IE versions anymore. It’s a fantastic setup.

Now if only there were conditional comments, and a version of Firebug for IE and Safari… Hey, a web designer can dream, right?

credit: CATR

Twitter is now all the rage. Your friends are doing it. Your mom is doing it. Even educated fleas are doing it. Microblogging is here to stay, and it’s caught on in a big way. According to Wikipedia, there are over 111 different ways to let everyone know what you had for breakfast online! Now the question is – how do we update them all at the same time?

There’s no doubt that RSS has made checking up on web content infinitely easier with its ability to bring websites to you, rather than you having to go to each site and see what’s new. Why shouldn’t we have a way to do that with status updates? No one wants to have to open MySpace, Facebook, and all the countless other social networking sites that are now on the “what are you doing” updating bandwagon one at a time. So let’s look at a few of the ways that make that simultaneous status updating a whole lot easier.

Hellotxt is a web-based solution that allows you to update your status on all the major players – Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and others. It retains your login info – even without creating an account which is a nice feature. The confirmation and sign-up process could use some work. Once I submitted my update, I was unsure if it had processed unless I manually checked the sites to see if they had changed. There wasn’t a clear “success” indication on Hellotxt’s interface. Also during sign-up, every username I tried said they were unavailable, so I entered one anyway and it went through. But I can give them some slack since they are still self-branded as being still in beta. They also offer a mobile version for registered users, and a Facebook app to make your updates while perusing there, if you’re so inclined.

Minggl is a new toolbar that collects all of your social networks into one easy-to-use place – the top of your browser, wherever you are online. While keeping tabs on all of your friends in the sidebar, it also has the ability to update your Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook statuses all at the same time. In case you don’t want want your personal status showing up on a professional network, like LinkedIn, you’re free to customize which ones you prefer. This works currently in Firefox on the PC and Mac, and Internet Explorer. They plan to support many other networks in the near future, such as Bebo and Orkut.

Digsby is a new instant messaging client that has been widely acclaimed for its ability to hook into social networking better than the other IM aggregators like Trillian, Adium, or Pidgin. In addition to keeping tabs on your IM contacts, Digsby lets you access your Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook accounts, and quickly update your Facebook status, and post a new tweet right from your system tray. MySpace updating isn’t supported yet, and there currently isn’t a way to update them all at the same time, but it’s remarkably fast access to all of your accounts, similar to Minggl. The real draw for Digsby is the potential to have a single status update for not only your social network accounts, but also all of your IM accounts. So you could imagine having a single place to update your status at AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber, in addition to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

If you’re only in need of Twitter and Facebook, TwitterSync will allow you to make your normal updates to Twitter, which will automagically push your status to Facebook as well. The main difference between TwitterSync and the official Twitter Facebook app is that it won’t prepend “is twittering” on your Facebook status.

So what’s the verdict?

For the time being, Hellotxt reigns supreme with their ease of use and widespread compatibility with all major social networks. Minggl comes in second with its fast from-the-browser status updating. In time, perhaps Digsby will follow suit and include simultaneous updating for all of your social networks, as well as your status in every IM account.