Fav.or.it

Picked this up from ReadBurner (hey another social aggregator), it’s fav.or.it which is integrates commenting with rss “river” feeds. It’s still on closed beta right now, but that’s no reason for you not to pre-register and jump right on the bandwagon once it opens up!

Check out the original article and some screenshots on Mashable.

If you’re deciding between this and FriendFeed which I just blogged about, why not go with both and see which you prefer in the long run? I’ll be uniquefrequency on both.

Facebook Fatigue?

I’ve been suspecting that Facebook’s been seeing a decline in activity for sometime. Just about half a year ago, the ‘home’ section with updates from my friends would be flooded hourly. Now I can login after 8 hours, and find that almost nothing has changed.

Suspicions have been confirmed with this article from ReadWriteWeb (once again picked up by Readburner, have I convinced you of its usefulness yet?), which says

There are now 15,422 apps on the Facebook platform — how many of them are truly useful? Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the novelty has worn off and users are finally starting to demand more of the applications they install.

The article also has statistics about the number of Facebook app users at their peak, and now:

	Peak	Today
Funwall	5800	2500
Superwall	4800	1800
Top Friends	2900	2200
Likeness	821	181
Super poke	1500	500
Movies	814	500
Compare People	1000	471
iLike	941	372
Causes	469	110
Superlatives	320	110
	All figures in 1,000s

There have been criticisms of Facebook in recent weeks: Marketing Pilgrim discusses a partnership between Facebook and the Wall Street Journal signalling desperation from either/both parties, and Jaffe Juice #101 has a comment on how disappointing it is that Facebook is not engaging the new media enough moving forward.

Applications are seriously beginning to rub some people the wrong way, and Facebook isn’t exactly providing the innovation that people want,  but I don’t think that’s making people tired of Facebook, or making them want to jump aboard the next new platform when it occurs.

Personally I think even with most apps stripped away, the Facebook interface is still superior to Friendster (for sure), and at least for network externality reasons, more popular here than MySpace. There are statistics to prove that MySpace is still dominant, but given that it never really caught on in Singapore, it’s not that relevant.

It would be great to hear what people here think, and maybe get a general idea of how the social networking scene is like in Singapore, and then publish some thoughts on that. My guess on where it’s going is the more frivolous applications (Grow a plant, hatch an egg?) will slowly die off, and the real social applications like iLike and Feedheads will gain popularity, as users begin to realise that Facebook can and should act not just as a Friendster clone, but a place to share information and interests in one central space.

Alerts On Readburner, Social Alternative To Google Reader

I woke to four comments today from Mike Reynolds from SquirrelNet and was curious how he stumbled upon the site. He forwarded me an email from a Google Alert on Readburner, which was a feature I hadn’t used before, but I’m definitely going to now. Yet another reason why Readburner is just awesome.

I’ve been up for about an hour, and I’ve already added three new additions to my Google Reader feeds, namely SquirrelNet, MediaShift (thanks to a Feedhead post by Prof. Netzley who shared a great post on How Google & Wiki have changed our lives) and Louisgray.com, referred to by Mike. No wonder it’s taking me longer and longer to check my feeds every day!

Anyway, on Louisgray, there’s an interesting article about AssetBar, which looks like a competitor to Google Reader, with a social element built in. Basically while you can share feeds in Google Reader, you don’t know what someone else might be thinking about it, other than the person liked it enough to share it. AssetBar changes that by allowing users to rate articles and comment on them as well. I haven’t had the time to try it yet, but hopefully I will soon and see if the whole commenting thing turns up anything interesting.

Twitter 101

I’m a relative newcomer to Twitter, but I’ve been looking for ways to use it better than just a Facebook status updater. Lo and behold, out comes a post on my Del.icio.us feed (actually I think it could’ve been my Readburner feed) on 17 Ways To Use Twitter.

Another article that got pushed to my feed is Newbie’s Guide To Twitter from Webware, which has guides to Facebook, Flickr and Google Reader too. Definitely a must-visit for newcomers to Web2.0 like myself

In other news, I’m really upset about the bandwidth limitation for Flickr. (100mb a month, and that’s not space, that’s bandwidth). I’m not annoyed enough to stop using it because I really like the sharing options, but I’m doing some research on other sites like Photobucket, Webshots, Picasa and maybe even Shutterfly. Let me know if you have opinions on these or any other photo-hosting sites.

Alternatives To Digg & Del.icio.us (No, Technorati Isn’t One Of Them)

Google Operating System posted this earlier this week about yet another aggregator called Readburner, which simply tallies up what’s most shared on Google Reader, and publishes them on it’s website. I’ve already subscribed to the feed, and so far, I like what I’m getting.

If Digg and Del.icio.us are a little to complicated and/or daunting for you (as I must admit, Del.icio.us still is for me), then this will probably be perfect.

And no, you can probably skip Technorati entirely, because not only it is really chaotic to navigate, but according to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, 99% of pings on Technorati are spam. Observing the amount of spam pingbacks I’ve been getting on this very tiny blog alone, I’m inclined to agree. This, coupled with the fact that Technorati’s layout needs some serious work, definitely would suggest that you give it a miss, at least for now. There are other, easier ways to get into the whole social media scene, for observer and participant alike.