CreativeFluff

Before even talking about this week’s kickass web application, lets talk about what makes it so especially awesome.  Most kickass web apps come not from invention, but from innovation and FriendFeed is no different.  Twitter, perhaps one of the most widely used microblogging tools has indefinitely been filled to capacity and we’re starting to see scene girls from Facebook (who came from myspace) pour into our tweets and @replies leaving us designers and creative individuals with a bitter taste in our mouths.  In order to make life easier to deal with in regards to Twitter, there was an amazing innovation.  Why not just let us just have multiple microblogging and social networking streams flowing through one application.  Twirl and Friendfeed do exactly that.

Twirl is actually a program developed on the Adove AIR Platform (Guess adobe is getting pretty serious).  Twirl describes its main features as such:

1. runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
2. connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and seesmicaccounts
3. notifications on new messages
4. shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
5. cross-post twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku
6. post images to TwitPic
7. search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan
8. timeline filtering
9. color schemes

As you can see it’s got what it takes to make stalking easier and Twitter a little less trendy.  The only gripe I have with Twirl is that it’s directly related to Twitter.  Friendfeed on the other hand, is something new unto itself.

FriendFeed talks about itself as a place where you can: 

“invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.”

Friendfeed is nice because it allows for direct embedding into things such as iGoogle so there’s no need to install any sort of software to your desktop.  It just needs access to your other social networking applications and you’re good to go.  Imagine it as a combination of Feedburner, Wordpress, Twitter, and Twirl.  You end up with Friendfeed.  Give both of the applications a go if you’re looking for something different ot manage your blogging or social bookmarks.  Enjoy!