While Twitter might be going through a rather rough time right now, a lot of developers are still banking on its success. There are already a lot of desktop clients available for Twitter, but besides some cosmetic differences, most of them look and act very much the same. TweetDeck, which released a new beta today, takes a refreshingly different approach by not only integrating support for search through Summize, but also by adding groups and by displaying more than one column at a time.

Features

TweetDeck is an AIR based application that was first discovered by Louis Gray. The major difference between TweetDeck and other Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitteriffic, and AlertThingy, is that it displays more than one column of information at a time. In TweetDeck, you can define columns for your replies, numerous searches in Summize, as well as groups. You can define up to 10 different columns.

The developers seem keenly aware of Twitter's problems and provide you with a status message at the bottom right of the client. We have seen it alternate between 'Pretty much okay' and 'Rate limit exceeded'' today. There is also an indication for when the last tweets were received in the bottom left corner of the application.

Columns

The column display can be rearranged according to taste - only the 'All Tweets' column is fixed on the left side. Having all these columns open at the same time obviously means that TweetDeck occupies a lot more screen estate than other Twitter clients - however, the amount of information displayed is far greater as well. For some, this is a trade-off worth making, while it might be a deal-breaker for others.

Groups

The groups function is very useful, especially for people who follow a lot of people, but still want to be able to quickly see what their closest friends (or competitors) are saying. Usually, these messages are easily drowned out in the mass of tweets that come in at any given time.

Once a group is created, you can make changes to it by clicking on its name.

Right now, when you create a group, TweetDeck doesn't display a list of all your friends right away. As TweetDeck becomes aware of more of your friends over time, this problem disappears as TweetDeck's internal database picks up on your friends, but this might be quite confusing and frustrating for first time users.

Preferences

One area where TweetDeck could use some more work is in its preferences - right now, there pretty much are none. You can't change the speed by which it checks for new tweets, there are no themes to chose from (why, by the way, do all AIR apps have to be so dark?), and there is no way to change the size of the fonts.

Verdict

TweetDeck is probably not for everyone, but especially with Twitter's track function still being offline for now, the ability to have a persistent Summize search right in the client is a great feature just by itself. Once the group function works a little bit better, I would venture to guess that a lot more people will start using it. But even in its current state, it is definitely worth a closer look.

The Iranian parliament is set to debate a draft bill that would add a number of crimes to the list of those that can result in execution, among them 'establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy.' Apostasy means the abandonment of a religion. The official Iranian news agency reports that the bill is intended to 'toughen punishment for harming mental security in society.'

Iran already imprisons bloggers for challenging the government and executed 317 people for other crimes last year, up from 177 the year prior according to Amnesty International.

The French Press Agency reported on the bill yesterday and according to The Committee to Protect Bloggers, the BBC's The World radio show will offer a more in depth report in the coming days.

Blogging is wildly popular in Iran, where a new generation of young people frequently challenge the old, hyper-conservative religious government. The Committe to Protect Bloggers says that Iran is 'among the worst offenders in terms of harassing, arresting and imprisoning bloggers, as well as students.' You can see the group's extensive coverage of Iranian cyber-censorship and harrasment of bloggers here. The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr, among other sites.

We at ReadWriteWeb condemn the application of the death penalty to bloggers as itself an abhorent crime. Cultural relativism has its place, but this isn't it. We want to offer our support to the new generation of Iranian young people struggling for freedom online and elsewhere, in any way we can, short of a US invasion of the country.

As Twitter began to fail on a regular basis, many of its users turned to other micro-blogging services to continue on with their 140-character lifestyle. Some returned to Jaiku or Pownce, others starting plurking, and just recently, an open source Twitter clone launched called identi.ca which has people 'denting' (Yes, really - it won the vote). And then there are the true social media addicts who joined each one of these services as they launched. For these folks, maintaining a presence in all the communities can be difficult, which is why finding a universal status updating service can help.

To update your social status on multiple services, there are several different options to choose from. We've listed some of the most popular ones below:

HelloTxt

HelloTxt was one of the first status updating services to arrive and still has the biggest list of supported services - currently 21 - to choose from. This list is the largest thanks to HelloTxt's support of several Twitter clone services that were either built for or that have attracted a non-English speaking userbase like the popular Italian service Meemi, the German and French Frazr, and the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French beemood.

HelloTxt is also available on the go on your mobile at m.hellotxt.com, via email, and via SMS. There's a facebook application, too.

Supported Services: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, MySpace, Brightkite, Bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, Tumblr, Meemi, Beemood, Plurk, Gozub, Frazr, Numpa, Mexicodiario, Feecle, Fanfou, Identica.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a newcomer, still in private beta (get in with the invite code 'pingyoulater'), and is fast becoming a popular competitor to HelloTxt. It doesn't have any of the smaller, foreign language services, but it still has a long list of services available - 17 in total at the moment - including a couple that HelloTxt misses like Xanga and Blogger.

In addition to the Ping.fm Facebook app, Ping.fm integrates with IM services like AOL, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger. There's also an iGoogle Gadget, a mobile web page, and an iPhone web app available. Profilactic uses Ping.fm's API to power their status updating service.

Supported services: Bebo, Blogger, Brightkite, Facebook, hi5, Identi.ca, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, Xanga.

Sendible

Sendible is the latest addition to the list of social media message-sending apps, this one more focused on the ability to schedule your messages than to do mass updates. Although the service supports several different services with more on the way, they have not yet provided an easy way to update all the services at once. However, the fact that messages can be scheduled is Sendible's unique feature, which is why it will have some draw - at least until another competitor comes along offering this and universal updates, too.

Supported services: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SMS, and email. They will also soon be supporting Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and Xing.

SocialThing!

Somewhat mistakenly hailed as a competitor to FriendFeed, SocialThing's goal is really to be more of a 'digital life manager' instead. Yes, it does stream your social media a la FriendFeed, but it also allows you to interact with that stream by sending data back to the supported services. In addition, you can use SocialThing! to update your status at any time by clicking on the 'Post' link found on the top-right of the homepage.

Supported services: del.icio.us, Digg, Last.fm, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, flickr, Pownce. In progress are LiveJournal, MySpace, and RSS. Users can also vote on what services will be added next.

Read our interview with SocialThing! founder, Matt Galligan here and a review of SocialThing! here.

Minggl

Minggl is a social interaction manager that comes in the form of a browser toolbar for Firefox 1.5+ and IE6+. With this toolbar, you can auto-login to your social networks at once and stay updated with the latest info about your friends' activity on the various services. Via its 'Status Blaster' feature, you can also easily update all the multiple social networks Minggl supports at the same time.

Supported services: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg

Apps!

There are several apps out there that allow you to interact with the various social services you use without logging into the services' web sites. However, the problem is that most of these apps focus on just one or two services, usually FriendFeed and Twitter. If that's all you need, then there are tons of apps to choose from including Twhirl, Alert Thingy, bTT, and mySocial AIR. (Plurkers can use Plurkair or Plurk It.)

Mac OS users have it even better, though - they have access to a downloadable app, MoodBlast, which updates Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, Skype, Adium, and iChat.

However, what we're really in need of is a cross-platform app that does the same. For example, Ping.fm or HelloTxt on AIR would rock. Someone build that please?

Read a review of Twhirl and Alert Thingy here.

Google's Street View launched in the US last May, but expanding the service to Europe is proving to be a bit more difficult for Google. The Google Maps blog today announced the release of Street View for the route of the Tour de France, but privacy activists in England are anything but amused by the prospect of Google starting to photograph the streets of London.

England's Privacy International doesn't trust in Google's ability to automatically blur faces. While in the US, photographing people in the street is absolutely legal without the need to ask for consent, in the UK, anyone who appears in a photo that is used commercially has to grant consent. Google is rumored to have started taking pictures in the UK this week.

However, Google's experiment with its face blurring technology in New York shows that they are quite capable of employing this technology. Google already blurs all license plate numbers in Street View as well.

This is, of course, a week where Google's privacy policies have been in the news almost every single day (and where Google finally put its privacy policy on its front page). After losing the private data of quite a few of its employees and being forced to release the records of its YouTube users to Viacom, Google was probably hoping to make the news today by having a little Uncle Sam in Street View to celebrate the 4th of July and by releasing Street View for the route of the Tour de France (after all, this is the first European appearance of Street View).

Polymeme is a new memetracker that bills itself as 'a polymath's guide to news.' Polymeme is the brainchild of Evgeny Morozov who started the project because of his frustration with most current memetrackers and the echo chamber effect often associated with them. Polymeme is based on Drupal and uses Reuter's OpenCalais to tag and index the 25,000 blogs it tracks.

Polymeme is trying to create what it calls a 'social infrastructure' for the non-tech and non-US politics blogospheres by creating an outlet for bloggers in fields ranging from economics to social science and education.

Polymeme is an ambitious project and it goes up against against more established meme trackers like Tailrank, Megite, Techmeme and Memeorandum, as well as the broad range of social news sites like Digg, Newsvine, and Yahoo! Buzz.

Hybrid Model

Polymeme is a hybrid system. Its front page is determined by a group of editors who pick the most interesting stories to be featured on the site from the pool of popular stories in the blogosphere as determined by Polymeme's memetracker back-end. This memetracker is never fully exposed to users, but the 'Popular Memes' section is determined algorithmically.

Because Polymeme only has a limited pool of editors, it can take some time for a story to appear on the front page. As Evgeny pointed out to us, though, having editors look for stories that would otherwise stay off the radar is 'a feature, not a bug.' Also, Polymeme argues that while the tech blogosphere moves very fast, other blogging verticals move a lot slower. In general, the site refreshes every 2-3 hours.

In many respects, this approach does resemble a newspaper ore journal more than a memetracker - but maybe that doesn't come as a surprise, given Evgeny's background as a journalist.

Features

While the site works very well without creating an account, logging into the site allows users to personalize the news selection and create personalized RSS feeds or email alerts. What Polymeme doesn't do is create a personalized feed based on keywords or on a user's OPML file like Megite does. For now, the personalization options stop at choosing topics from a menu of different sections of the site .

Polymeme's Buzz section is another interesting feature of the site. Buzz is basically a tag-cloud interface to Polymeme based on the tags automatically created by OpenCalais, and while it broke once or twice during testing, it does present an interesting way for browsing blogs.

Verdict

Where Polymeme really shines is in the selection of blogs it tracks, which is extremely wide and global in its scope. Looking at the articles featured on Polymeme today, there is very little overlap with those of other memetrackers.

Polymeme is an interesting experiment. The hybrid model of tracking memes but also employing editors might seem a bit strange at first, but so far, the editors have done a good job at highlighting interesting stories that did mostly fly under the radar of the traditional memetrackers.

Whether Polymeme can help us break out of the echo chamber (or whether it just creates a bigger echo chamber) remains to be seen - for now, it's an experiment worth taking a look at.

For users of the Windows Mobile platform, visiting Facebook while on the go meant loading up the mobile web page in their device's browser. Meanwhile, Blackberry users have had their own downloadable app since late 2007. But now, as of today, there is at long last a downloadable application just for Windows Mobile users, FriendMobilizer.

Today Macrospecs, Inc. has launched FriendMobilizer, a new software application for Windows Mobile phones that gives you full access to your Facebook account. Unlike other Windows Mobile Facebook apps like Snap2Face, which only provides for photo uploads, FriendMobilizer gives Windows Mobile users an app that's comparable in feature set to the Blackberry version.

With FriendMobilizer, you can view your friend's information and profiles, write on their walls, browse photo albums, approve friend requests, view group and event invites, read your new wall posts, read the messages in your inbox, update your status, and more.

Click Image to See Larger Version

The application is currently available for both Windows Mobile devices and Pocket PCs and can be downloaded from the web site at www.faceofmobile.com. However, according to the company, the generic software platform developed for FriendMobilizer will soon be ported to other mobile OS's as well. In addition, the company plans to build mobile apps for other social networks in the future.

2008 has seen a big change in the way the blogging community communicates with each other. In a nutshell, discussions have become very fragmented. There are two main reasons for this: firstly Twitter and its 140 character soundbites has become very popular among bloggers, and secondly FriendFeed has tipped as the lifestreaming aggregator of choice for many people. The upshot is that there are now many places where people can have online discussions. This has been a challenge to blog publishers, for whom comments are an integral part of the blogging experience.

Over the past few months, the ReadWriteWeb team has been discussing internally how to adapt to this. We've discussed whether to use services such as Disqus, YackTrack and SezWho, which enable people to track and rate blog comments. However our conclusion was that those types of apps are unsuitable for a large multi-author blog like ReadWriteWeb - there are question marks over ability to handle the load, what happens if the service goes down, SEO, and other issues. And to be frank, personally I haven't found the user experience of any of those apps to be very compelling (we've tested one of them on RWW before).

FriendFeed Comments

So we got to discussing how to utilize FriendFeed and/or Twitter in ReadWriteWeb. To make a long story short, ReadWriteWeb recently implemented a new Movable Type plug-in called FriendFeed Comments. The plug-in was developed by Mark Carey and it enables FriendFeed comments (and by extenstion Twitter comments) to show up on ReadWriteWeb posts as comments - and vice versa! Note that there is a similar Wordpress plug-in, developed by Glenn Slaven.

Full disclosure, Mark Carey is a Technical Consultant for ReadWriteWeb. But he also runs his own business, which includes developing Movable Type plug-ins. So ReadWriteWeb was the first blog to test FriendFeed Comments out. As Mark explains, it "enables you to import and display comments made using FriendFeed on your entries. You can also use the plugin to enable your blog commenter to "Cc." their comments to FriendFeed (if they have a FriendFeed account)."

Here is an illustration of how it works:

People commenting in FriendFeed about our post profiling Identi.ca

The FriendFeed comments show up on the RWW post

To send comments from RWW into FriendFeed, simply click the 'cc' link

What I love about the MT and Wordpress FriendFeed plug-ins is that they recognize the fact that conversations are occurring elsewhere, but they bring the discussion back to the source of the content where relevant. It's win-win as far as I can see.

And Now Please Fix Trackbacks...

Six Apart's David Recorden implied in a post that the FriendFeed plug-in operates in a similar way to Trackback. On that point, RWW has had a lot of issues with trackback. During our discussions internally about the plug-in, we also considered if it could somehow be adapted to replace or augment trackbacks. Because frankly trackbacks don't work for us. We are one of the most linked-to blogs in the world, yet we get just a trickle of trackbacks. So if there is a way to integrate link-backs to ReadWriteWeb as easily as the FriendFeed plug-in integrates outside discussion, then I'd be one very happy publisher! Consider that a challenge to the plug-in developers out there ;-)

What are your thoughts on the state of distrubuted discussions in the blogosphere? And how can we give trackback the same makeover that blog comments has gotten in 2008?