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.

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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.

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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:

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I recently started a Twitter discussion with Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks on the relevance and usefulness of the <small></small> tag. I’ve had this same debate with co-workers on why one would still use <small></small> over just using a <p></p> or <span></span> with an appropriate <class></class> or <id></id> to define the “smallness” of the tag. The one thing we both noticed is that no one uses the <big></big> tag anymore, so why should anyone use the <small> </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.

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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?

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Thanks to twitter, I was able to keep a detailed record of the entire trip my wife and I took this year as we went, rather than try to recall it all after we got back home. It offered my friends and family up-to-the-minute news of our vacation, which made for a great way to let everyone know what a grand time we were having. It also had the interesting side effect of not having to tell my twitter followers and avid facebook friends about my trip at all – as they already knew everything we did! So for those that didn’t fall into one of those camps, here’s a breakdown of how it went:

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