Here are some simple ways to display a lifestream of all of your social networking activity in one place. Some solutions involve using a third-party service, while others require the use of a free plugin or widget for your blog.

Lifestream Plugin For WordPress Blogs

I really like this simple but powerful free Lifestream plugin for self-hosted WordPress* blogs. It lets you display all of your activity on many social networks all on one page.

All you have to do is install and enable the plugin, then you just add the social networks you want to display via the lifestream settings page.

The final step is to create a new page and enter a one word line of code: [lifestream], which displays the lifestream on your site.

*Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Friendfeed Widgets and Badges
If you use Friendfeed (now owned by Facebook) then you can use some of its cool tools to embed all of your social networking streams on your web site. There are a couple of different ways to do this.

You can use the “Real-time” widget in your sidebar to display a real-time feed of all your streams.

Or you can also use a smaller “Status” widget that only displays the latest activity:

UnHub

Another way to share your all of your brand’s activity is through a third-party service such as UnHub. With UnHub, you just pick and choose which feeds you want to share on what it calls the “Personal Profile Bar.” One of the biggest downsides to this method is that you can only access it via a URL which comes in the following structure:  http://unhub.com/YourName

The other big difference with UnHub is that all of your streams are segmented by service, and not displayed all together in chronological order, as with the Lifestream method.

Social Networking Aggregation

No matter which method you choose to share your activity on social networks, the great thing about all of them is their simplicity. What I like best about these solutions is that you can set them up and forget about them for the most part; they don’t require maintenance.

I think it makes sense to centralize your brand in one place, namely your web site or blog. It’s also a good move for personal blogs and web sites too, making it easy for friends to keep up with what you’re up to.

Let us know what you think of these options and share any others in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Media Works, Just Not for BP
• Google’s Social Scheme Hinges on Fears, Not Fortunes

So how can a lesser-known app like Diigo compete? The latest version of Diigo has just gone live, and from what I can tell, it’s growing beyond social bookmarking and going for the “kitchen-sink” approach: Add as many features as possible, so that no matter what a user wants, it’ll be there. Among the list of new features are a few that caught my eye:

• Similar to Iterasi, users can now archive web pages from a particular point in time — even ones that are dynamically generated or password-protected. Multiple versions of the same page can be saved, either as HTML or images. Toolbars to control this function are available for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
• There are now several options for commenting on web pages — highlighting in multiple colors, and different sizes of sticky notes, all of which can be private or shared.
• Links to the archived and annotated web pages can be shared via email, Twitter or Facebook, and recipients don’t need any special software to see your comments.
• Groups can be set up to comment, tag and collaborate on projects.

The site is still in beta, but its redesigned interface is intuitive. Searching and tagging have also been improved, and an iPhone app is on the way. The site is free and advertising-supported; educational accounts are available.

Oh, and by the way, Diigo is one of the few sites I’ve seen that offers an explanation of its name:

Diigo is pronounced as “Dee’go.” The name “Diigo” is an abbreviation for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.”

If Diigo’s impressive feature list hasn’t convinced you to try it, I’m sure that will!

Have you tried Diigo?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

I read a lot of online publications, and I like to share interesting articles with clients and friends on Twitter.  If you use Google Reader to browse RSS feeds, as I do, it’s now easier to post links to news articles you’ve found in Google Reader to sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg.

In Google Reader’s Settings, you’ll now find an option called “Send To.” On that screen, you can specify which services you want to be able to post to. Once you’ve set it up, at the bottom of each article in the main Google Reader screen, you’ll see a “Send To” menu.

The system does work, but it’s decidedly low-tech. As an example, if you click “Send to Twitter,” Google Reader brings you to your Twitter account via a popup window, meaning that you’ll need to turn off popup blocking for google.com in your browser — something many people will prefer not to do.

By comparison, most of the other services that allow you to post to Twitter, like FriendFeed, Ping.fm, Streamy, Amplify and Posterous, use the Twitter oAuth system, which is much slicker — although oAuth has been down a lot recently due to the attacks against Twitter. I will probably continue to use FriendFeed as my link between Google Reader and Twitter, but the new Reader feature is a nice alternative option.

In addition to the “Send To” feature, Google Reader has added a dropdown menu to the “Mark All as Read” button that allows you to mark as read only those articles older than a day, a week, or two weeks. You can also easily subscribe to the feeds of people you follow, and there are added enhancements to the comment screen, and to the start pages of the mobile versions of the Reader.

How do you post links to Twitter and other social sites?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Standard Operators

FriendFeed’s search uses the AND operator by default, but its implementation of the OR operator can be a little confusing. You can use the standard OR operator between keywords to state that one or other (or both) of the keywords must be present, but if you want to use OR with the advanced operators, you need to use a “,” (example: meetup OR tweetup service:delicious,upcoming). You can also search for phrases using quotes and exclude results using the “-” operator.

Subsets

It is important to note that you can search across all of FriendFeed (the default) or limit the search to results only from your friends. For example, here’s a search for monitoring across all of FriendFeed, and the same search with results from my friends:

• monitoring
• monitoring friends:geekygirldawn

I keep several friend lists. I have a list for the people who are involved in community management and another list of people who have a knack for knowing about new technologies before most people. Those are my two favorite friend lists to search. You can get to this option using the advanced search page or with the following syntax to search for the word “monitoring” in my “community” friend list.

• monitoring list:community

There are also a few other useful subset searches to narrow your search to posts from a particular friend or a group:

• facebook from:gigaom
• panel group:sxsw

Services

Filtering a FriendFeed search by service can be really useful. For example, I often filter the Twitter posts out of my searches to cut down on the noise in my search.

As I mentioned in my previous post about Twitter search, Twitter search only returns results from the last 10 days or so. You can  actually use FriendFeed to search a little further back into the Twitter timeline, at least for those Twitter posts that have also been sent to FriendFeed, by limiting your search just to the Twitter service. I’m not sure exactly how far back in time FriendFeed searches, since it seems to vary by service; however, I am seeing search results from Twitter that are around 40 days old and results from blogs that are much older.

Here are a few examples of searching for “monitoring conversations.” The first example excludes posts from Twitter from the results, while the second just includes results from Delicious and Google Reader:

• “monitoring conversations” -service:twitter
• “monitoring conversations” service:delicious,googlereader

Popularity

As usual, I have saved the best for last. Searching based on popularity measures is what makes the FriendFeed search so powerful. The volume of posts on FriendFeed is so high that it can be difficult to find the most interesting posts on a topic. Filtering your results by the number of likes and comments particular posts have received is a great way to find the posts that are most interesting to people. Here are some simple examples:

• monitoring comments:20
• “community management” likes:10

Where this becomes really powerful is when you use it in combination with some of the search operators mentioned in the sections above.

• facebook comments:5 likes:5 list:news-makers
• facebook research comments:20 likes:20 -service:twitter
• comments:20 likes:20 from:jowyang -service:twitter

Consuming Search

The fun doesn’t stop with the advanced searches. You can also consume FriendFeed searches in so many different ways.

• RSS: Get your search as an RSS feed and put it in your favorite reader.
• Saved searches: Save your searches to reuse them over and over.
• Share: You can share your search with other people.
• Embed: Embed your search to display the results on other sites.

In this post I covered most of the advanced search operators for FriendFeed, but for the full list, visit the advanced search page.

What are your favorite uses for FriendFeed search?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

While a fire hose of notifications and feeds can be too distracting when I’m working on things for client, if I’m looking for inspiration for a new blog post or new venture of some sort, I want to see as much information as possible in the hope that something will catch my eye and provide the inspiration that I need.

Here are a few of my favorite tools for embracing information overload. Please beware that these tools are known to sap productivity and suck up precious hours that can never be regained! Use these techniques at your own risk.

FriendFeed Notifier will send you pop-up messages every time one of your friends posts something to FriendFeed or comments on a post. For maximum information overload, make sure that you select the following options: show updates when someone comments on my posts, show updates from my home feed, and show posts and all comments. For the wimpier among us, you can choose to show updates only from a small list of friends or show posts only.

Tweetdeck or other Twitter clients with notifications turned on at full blast. I’ve talked about using reduced notifications with Tweetdeck to get targeted notifications for groups and searches, but for the full effect, you can also get notifications for the “all friends” feed (in other words, notifications for every single tweet). If you set this up right, you can get duplicate notifications for all of the tweets posted on FriendFeed and the tweets coming in through your Twitter client. I’m joking! I suggest only using one of the two options presented so far at a time, unless you really are a glutton for punishment.

Snackr gives you a scrolling RSS ticker with news from your feeds. You can even import everything from your RSS reader and have huge quantities of information scrolling across the bottom of your screen all day. I admit that would probably be a bit much. I took a subset of my feeds with my favorite tech news blogs along with a few interesting people, and I imported that subset into Snackr.

What are your tips for embracing information overload?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• In Q3, NewNet Focus Turns to Business Models and Search

Thus, there are a number of sites that are intended to help put all of your online presences in one place. I’ve tried a few of these aggregators. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, so check them out, and see which options might work for you.

DandyID

Of the services I discuss here, DandyID is the easiest to set up, because it doesn’t try to do too much. This is a simple service that creates an online profile showing your name, bio, contact information, web links, and your online identities. You can specify your online identity for over 330 social networks, including sites from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Poland. Plus, you can add sites not on its list.

When you first sign up, DandyID has an option for importing contacts from services like Gmail, although the import failed for me, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to try again. I’m not sure what advantage you get from importing your contacts, anyway.

The profile page DandyID creates is very basic and not very customizable. But Facebook users may choose DandyID because it offers a very nice app that allows you to embed your online presences into your Facebook page.

Retaggr

Retaggr bills itself as “the modern day equivalent of a business card.” Aliza wrote about this service last year, and noted how it had improved a few months later.

When you sign up, you’re taken to a well-designed form where you provide Retaggr with information about yourself, and about the places you have online presences. I counted over 180 different social networks, and you can add sites not listed. (Apparently, you can import some of this information if you have a FriendFeed account, but that option didn’t work for me.) You can also add information about groups with which you are affiliated, and widgets allowing people to IM you directly.

You get three ways of displaying the information you’ve entered:

• A profile page on the Retaggr site (and which can be used with a custom domain name if you buy its premium service). The page can be set to display your status from Twitter and Facebook, blog entries and even pictures from Flickr.
• A virtual “business card” that can be embedded almost anywhere on the web, and in email signatures.
• An “add me” button that can be used to encourage others to connect with you.

ClaimID

While you can use ClaimID to list your profiles on social networks, the site is really about aggregating any web page or site that you wish to “claim,” either as author or subject. This is done by adding MicroID code to the web pages in question to show you have access to them.

So instead of offering you a list of social networks, as DandyID and Retaggr do, ClaimID offers a “Post to ClaimID” bookmarklet that you install in your browser, then click it whenever you want to add a site to your ClaimID page. You can then organize the links into categories and annotate them as you wish.

This site might be a good way for, say, writers or web developers to put together a portfolio, although if you don’t need ownership verification, it would be easy to produce a similar-looking site with basic web page editing tools.

GizaPage

As Scott discussed recently, GizaPage‘s concept is simple: One URL displays a series of tabs showing the social network sites you select. Web developers will recognize that this is essentially a “Web 2.0″ version of HTML frames, with options that allow the GizaPage owner to select who gets to see what. I like the concept, but the site seems often to be slow and buggy for me. But it has potential, and is definitely worth watching.

Chi.mp

By far the most comprehensive option for managing online identities is Chi.mp, which Darrell recently wrote about. Read his review for details; I’ll just say that Chi.mp offers many options that none of the above services do, notably:

• A custom domain name as a standard feature (optional with Retaggr).
• The ability to show different information to public, work and home groups.
• Some customization of the site’s template.
• Twitter-like posting of status and images.
• Contact management (Chi.mp calls it the “Ultimate Black Book”).

Because Chi.mp has so many features, it takes more setting up than the other options, and, I suspect, more maintenance. But it may be an attractive option for those who need a hub for their web presences, and are willing to spend the time to use its features to the fullest.

Conclusion

There are a number of other services for aggregating social network identities. Many of these products are in beta, or just don’t seem to work very well. I’ve tried a few, and will hold my opinions until we see how they develop. Like the social networking field itself, I’m sure that the best services will survive, and others will fade away.

For now, though, I found Retaggr to be the most useful service for managing online identities, although signing up for DandyID may be worth it just for the Facebook app.

How do you manage your social identities?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

So here are my 10 Golden Rules of Social Media to embrace, debate, pass around and refine. Have at it.

1. Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net. Since 1995, I’ve been writing about and talking about what I call the “Spirit of the ‘Net.” The Internet was not meant for marketing and selling but for communication and connection to people and information. Understanding this, even today, can flip your marketing and selling strategy on its head, but you’ll have far more success respecting the spirit of the ‘Net, rather than throwing money at hard-sell tactics.

2. Listen. In the ’90s, the Golden Rule of posting to a Usenet Newsgroup or other online community was to listen first before speaking. Listening thoughtfully gives you a better sense of not only what people are saying but also how they are feeling. In virtual spaces where there are no visual cues, good listening skills become a powerful asset. Listening also helps you map out your current social media footprint and measure your marketing campaigns over time. The key to successful social media marketing is listening.

3. Add Value. Enter any online conversation with the aim of adding value. Before posting a message as a new participant in a forum, ask yourself: How is this providing value to the conversation? To the community? In some circles, talking about your product or service can be considered valuable, but in most, it is unwelcome and intrusive.

4. Respond. From the early days of setting up the first web presences for clients such as Origins and Dr. Atkins, my company outlined the importance of timely responses to any feedback or queries generated from those sites. The burden of response can be great, but it can be lessened by using the right tools and crowdsourcing answers. A quick response is more important than ever, and thanks to search tools, alert apps and other services, it is possible to achieve. Don’t be a dam in a conversation flow.

5. Do Good Things. Back in the ’90s, a mentor and dear friend — Jerry Colonna — talked about “doing well by doing good,” sparking in me the confidence to build a successful business with an underlying mission to help others. Doing good things can really help you to succeed in social media, too. Just do a Google search for Social Media for Social Good to see the power of this movement. This goes beyond adding value online. It means fundamentally changing your business model from a single bottom line — profit — to a triple bottom line — people, planet, profit — and then perpetuating this social responsibility to all you do in business, including online marketing and selling. I’m working with a financial client right now who truly believes in doing good. My client’s messages and conversations around social good are getting much more traction than the regular financial messages.

6. Share the Wealth. When I used to talk about the Internet around the world, one key tenet I repeated almost every time was to share the wealth. “If you’ve got it, share it, spread it around,” I’d say, but I wasn’t only talking about money. I was talking about time, information and knowledge. In social media, sharing is the fuel of the conversation engine.

7. Give Kudos. Social media works when you are generous. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion, but things really take off when you give others praise or a moment in the spotlight. The rise of retweeting — real retweeting, not spammy retweeting — shows how far giving credit to others can go in social spaces.

8. Don’t Spam. And speaking of spam, there is also an ugly surge of spamming in social media, today’s equivalent of unscrupulous email marketers who inundated our email boxes with garbage and left a bad taste in our mouths for email marketing. On Twitter, I’m finding it a daily chore to delete people I’m following who send out spam messages, but I just don’t have the time, interest or bandwidth to tolerate the “Get Lots of Followers on Autopilot” spam.

9. Be Real. Authenticity is the secret ingredient behind any good and valuable social media marketing campaign. If you know your audience, locate them online, listen, add value, respond, refrain from spamming and just be yourself, you’ll have far better and more long-lasting positive results than if you try to be someone — or something — you’re not.

10. Collaborate. Before you dive into social media for marketing and selling, take a look at who is out there and who is doing it well. How can you work with them, instead of trying to muscle your way into the space with all of your dollars? Those will often be dollars wasted because people can feel that push and recoil from the hard sell, blog about your misstep, sign petitions to boycott your company, you name it. If you put your money in places where it can do good while generating goodwill for your brand, you’ll be much more likely to get a positive result from social media.

Social media tools are only that — tools. The real energy, spirit and power of social media is people. We are social media.

What are your Golden Rules of Social Media? What am I missing?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Dos and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing
• Google’s Social Scheme Hinges on Fears, Not Fortunes

One of the challenges is that the connections I’ve made through one service have a hard time finding me on the others. GizaPage, a new service launching in beta today, hopes to make that process easier.

When you sign up for GizaPage, you get a customizable URL (for example, mine is scottblitstein.gizapage.com) which can serve as a dashboard of sorts for all of your online profiles. Currently supporting over 40 services, you pin your accounts together to create a virtual catalog of your online presence. Connections can browse through your tabs to see where else you are active.

GizaPage isn’t an aggregator in the traditional sense. Unlike something like FriendFeed, which pulls your updates from the various sites it supports, GizaPage lets people view your full profile pages in a convenient tabbed environment.

The tabbed interface is also a convenient way for me as a user to be able to easily access all of the profiles I’ve added from one place.

One of the most compelling features of GizaPage is the built-in privacy controls. You can establish a public profile but then also include, or pin, additional profiles that are only viewable to those that you have connected with. Also, because you are just presenting your publicly available profiles from the various sites you use, there is no need to share your login information with GizaPage.

The process of connecting with friends was a bit odd, though. I was given the option of importing my contacts from Gmail, for example, but it never really told me what it was going to do with that info. I imagine it will show me if any of those folks have a page of their own, but a bit more help and information during the import process would be helpful.

The concept of personal branding is a hot topic right now. A well-populated GizaPage could be a good compliment to Google’s recent Profile enhancements. My GizaPage profile isn’t yet showing up in a Google search, but as the service is adopted by more people, its search ranking will likely improve over time.

Creating a GizaPage is currently free, but expect an option for premium services to be available in the future.

How do you maintain your online personal brand?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

In fact, social media web sites such as Twitter, FriendFeed and  Facebook have the potential to take over many of the functions of RSS readers such as Google Reader, Newsgator and Bloglines.

Twitter
Amidst all the hubbub of Ashton Kutcher and CNN and Oprah Winfrey and Save Chuck, Twitter has become a nifty and dynamic way to receive inbound alerts about news stories and information, giving the ability to turn your Twitter stream into an “RSS reader” of sorts.

There are a few different ways to use Twitter as an RSS reader. The first is to simply follow those users who broadcast links to stories and web sites that you find interesting and relevant (Robert Scoble, for example, when it comes to all things tech, Internet and geek). This is a means of crafting your own “smart people network” that sends the best stories and links to you. As David Drager at systemBash writes, “I find it awesome to be able to see what is going on, without having to manage ‘feeds.’”

The second way to use Twitter as an RSS reader is to literally send RSS feeds into your Twitter stream using a service like Twitterfeed. This works well for people who want to see a “firehose” of stories on their Twitter profile that can be browsed throughout the day. Twitterfeed also works in conjunction with microblogging services Identi.ca and Laconica, and status update services HelloTxt and Ping.fm.

FriendFeed
One of the best services for harnessing social media to create an inbound source for content and links from trusted sources is FriendFeed. If anything, the challenge with FriendFeed is to use the right set of folders and filters to best craft your personalized RSS reader-like experience.

For example, Justin Korn discusses the use of “imaginary friends” to set up customized RSS feeds for the topics that you’d like to keep track of. A somewhat simpler means of using FriendFeed as an RSS reader is to make use of filters. The default filters on FriendFeed are “Favorites”, “Personal”, and “Professional”, but you can customize them however you like. For example, you could set up a “Sports” filter for sources that link to a lot of sports-related stories that you’re likely to be interested in.

Facebook
Facebook is an interesting case study to look at as it’s one of the most popular social networking/social media web sites in the world, yet takes more of a “walled garden” approach as compared to Twitter and FriendFeed, as you can only interact with people who are your Facebook friends.

Can Facebook be used as an RSS reader? Well, sort of. ReadWriteWeb covered the shutting down of a Facebook app “that turned your newsfeed into an RSS feed” as it interfered with Facebook’s privacy policies. Marshall Kirkpatrick muses that the “wall that keeps Facebook user data in and private by default feels too contrary to the fundamental nature of the Internet for it to last.”

However, Facebook is still a useful place to pick up news and information from trusted sources (your friends and contacts) as each individual can pipe RSS feeds into their own newsfeed, so you can still use Facebook as a limited inbound RSS reader of sorts, via your Facebook friends.

Finally

A New Comm Biz piece asks, “Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream?” Perhaps in some ways it already is, and will continue to evolve through social media web sites like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook.

Do you use social media web sites as RSS readers?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google’s Social Scheme Hinges on Fears, Not Fortunes

As 2009 is shaping up, the most popular and relevant social networks and social media platforms for web workers are Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and LinkedIn. Granted, there’s a vast galaxy of other valuable and interesting social web sites to select from, but it’s important to get a sense of how to get the most out of this particular foursome.

Twitter
Twitter was a phenomenon in 2007, a rising social media star in 2008, and has largely attained mainstream status in 2009 (cable news stations are falling all over themselves these days in attempt to send you to their Twitter profile, for example). It’s simply one of the most important places to be online. It’s also an amazingly simple and flexible product, which befuddles some and delights many.

While Twitter’s flexibility makes it very useful for all kinds of things — from live event reporting to simply staying in  touch with friends and colleagues — I’m coming to believe its most important use for web workers is as a “social media marketing tool.” That, of course, can have many meanings, but think of it like this: it’s a tool to engage the now-mainstream Twitter community in a friendly way, putting a human face on your product or service (or the brand called you!). The counterintuitive fact is that the more you use Twitter as a place to help people and talk about your life and the world at large, the more you’re likely to draw people to trust you — and the brand that you represent — more.

FriendFeed
While FriendFeed doesn’t have the numbers that Twitter does (see Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch piece, “FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses“), it’s the best place online to consume information and interact with smart people. FriendFeed is a merry mix of content aggregator, microblogging platform and social network that has become official residence for early adopters and social media influencers such as Robert Scoble, Louis Gray and Rob Diana. As a web worker, you owe it yourself to at least check in with FriendFeed to see what’s going on with the “Coolest App.” And you just might find yourself hooked in the process.

Facebook
Facebook hit mainstream status some time back, and its astounding growth has continued into 2009. I’m a little bit of a contrarian when it comes to Facebook, but I fully recognize that it’s one of the premiere online hubs for web workers to connect with friends and colleagues, share information and media, and to play with all manner of Facebook apps, games and social networking gizmos. Whether or not Facebook is your thing, and much like with MySpace during the middle years of this decade, having some kind of Facebook presence falls somewhere between expected and a given for web workers.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn sits in the coveted position of dominating the professional networking space online. One of the reasons that it stands apart from other more “social” social networks is because there’s a higher barrier to connecting with people on LinkedIn than with other social networking websites. In many cases, you have to know someone’s personal email in order to send them a friend request, though paid accounts allow you to send “InMails” to a wider range of people on the site. LinkedIn also offers many professional discussion groups, so it’s a web site that web workers need to be linked up with for professional networking and professional development purposes.

What social networks do you use?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

Interesting conversations are happening all over the web, on blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and many other sites. People are talking about you, your company and your industry, and revealing many tips and tricks that you should know. I am a self-confessed data junkie, so I have a few tips to help you make sense of the massive amounts of data available and to focus on monitoring just what really matters.

Use a Dashboard

An RSS-based monitoring dashboard is a great way to collect everything you’re monitoring into one place. I’ve set these up for clients in a number of different ways depending on the preference of the person responsible for monitoring. For people new to RSS, I generally encourage them to use something like Netvibes, which has a visual layout with multiple tabs and columns where you can see several key conversations at a glance. I have a couple of sections in my RSS reader where I keep everything that I’m monitoring, and I make sure that they are the first things I read.

Filter Your Feeds

Filtering RSS feeds through Yahoo Pipes or other tools is a good way to make sure that your monitoring dashboard contains relevant content and not just a list of blogs to read. I use Yahoo Pipes to filter for mentions of my name, my company and efforts that I am involved with across various sites (Twitter, FriendFeed, blogs, Flickr, video sites, etc.) Yahoo Pipes can also be used to combine many feeds and filter those high-volume RSS feeds for only relevant content that you need to know. Tools like PostRank are a good way to find the posts within a feed that are generating the most buzz.

Choose the Right Twitter Client

Use a smart Twitter client that lets you group the important people that you want to monitor and provides a way to get real-time notifications for mentions of certain keywords. TweetDeck is a good choice. I have a couple of different groups set up to help make sure that I see the posts from people who have important ideas and who provide me with the greatest value. I also have keyword searches in TweetDeck for companies or events that I am involved with to make sure that I don’t miss any important conversations about these efforts on Twitter.

Find Hot Topics With FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a great way to find the hot topics of the day, to make sure that you’re keeping up with industry trends and new tools or techniques that you can apply to your work. I like to group people by topic, like community management, and use the “best of” feature to find the best posts of the day, week or month from those subgroups of people. The example below shows the best post of the month from my “News Makers” group. It’s an easy way for me to filter the flood of content in FriendFeed down to something much more manageable.

FriendFeed Best of Month

While monitoring is important, you should also be responding to these conversations. People are more likely to engage with you in future if they get a response back, rather than feeling like their feedback went into a black hole. Respond to as many @replies on Twitter as you can, and also use your blog for longer responses or to post reactions to relevant conversations that are happening across the web.

What are your tips and tricks for monitoring online conversations?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns

It turns out that Blellow is more than just a name. In fact, it’s an ambitious microblogging platform geared toward the web working and networking set. Note that I used “networking” without the commonly tacked-on “social” in front of it. Blellow is looking to become the LinkedIn of microblogging platforms, as opposed to the more chit-chatty, freewheeling space (crammed into 140-character or less bursts) that Twitter currently occupies.

The idea is that while Twitter and Facebook are now relatively “mainstream” places to keep up with current friends and ruminate about thoughts both big and small, Blellow offers a platform for microblogging professionals and web workers to coordinate meetups, find jobs, seek out projects and engage in professional conversations through the “groups” areas of the site.

One of the first things you’ll notice after you register and login to Blellow is that it feels different than most microblogging sites. There’s a torrent of statistics and communications management tools on the left column, including detailed stats that run down the number of friends, followers, “@” replies and “kudos” you’ve received (which may seem familiar to those of you who spend time using MySpace blogs) as well as data on public and private groups. With regard to kudos, Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable points out that, “Kudos are like credibility, so each time you receive kudos for a job well done, you’ll rank higher in Blellow search results, which could expose you to new clients and more work opportunities.”

Like Yammer, Blellow asks the simple question: “What are you working on?” In response to that question, Blellow allows you to enter up to 300 characters, which may be a more comfortable space to get a fully-formed thought in, as opposed to the 140-character limit that Twitter famously imposes.

Blellow handles public groups in kind of a nifty way. While Twitter uses the hashtag (#) convention to allow Twitter search and other third-party services to track topics, Blellow uses the percent sign (%) for tracking group conversations. For example, Apple Love (“A group for the discussion of Mac OS X, Apple Desktop & Laptops, and of course, the iPhone”), is set up with “%apple” in the post entry field when you visit the group’s page. That means posts entered from the Apple Love group, as well as anywhere else on Blellow in which “%apple” is used, will be aggregated into the group’s stream. This is a smart way, in my view, to allow for the organic creation of mini-communities within the larger Blellow platform. The challenge with any new social site, of course, that offers many features is to get people to use them and to avoid the dreaded “ghost town effect” in which things look a bit tumble weed-y.

Private groups is an area that Blellow is looking to monetize, charging $5 per month for a private group with up to 1GB of storage, or $10 per month for 10 GBs. If Blellow can make headway in signing up groups in any numbers, look for other microblogging sites to follow this model. That said, because strong private group experiences already exist for free in other products like FriendFeed Rooms, it’s likely it will be hard to get many to cough up cash for a private group, at least initially.

The way in which the Jobs section is set up reveals much about who Blellow is targeting, namely web workers and creative professionals. With a default setting of All, there are currently filters for Design, Development, Writing and Other.

The Projects section, an entirely separate area found on Blellow’s top navigation menu, again focuses on web workers looking to make some extra money or to engage in a resume-building project of some sort. Examples of projects – which may be toggled between Paid and Pro Bono – include designing a business web site, building a Facebook app and writing a web site review.

Would you consider using Blellow for business networking or for finding work?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

(via TechCrunch)

Twitter and other microblogging services are radically shifting the ways in which people communicate and share information. And that shift is now entering the workplace on a large scale, particularly for web workers and for companies who are embracing the ways in which microblogging platforms can save time while increasing productivity.

Yammer, which plays off the already classic Twitter call to action, “What are you doing?” by asking, “What are you working on?” is an easy-to-use microblogging service that is tailored to the workplace and organizations in several important ways.

As Hutch Carpenter boldly states, in a piece called Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email, “As more companies take up microblogging with services like Yammer, Socialcast, Present.ly and SocialText Signals, employee communications amongst employees will both increase and divert away from email.”

Carpenter then presents an equivalently bold image to illustrate how he believes microblogging can reduce the glut of email in the workplace.

Indeed, while I was at South by Southwest in Austin this past week, I heard people joke around to the effect of, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all emails had to be 140 characters or less?” Services like Yammer and Socialcast help to reduce the burden and overload that email brings to the workplace by providing the simple, flexible communication of microblogging with a number of specific work-related features.

While Twitter offers private accounts, services like Yammer and Present.ly impose a higher level of security by locking each network down to only those people who have an individual company email address.

The additional draw of these services in comparison to Twitter are features such as tagging, archiving, groups, attachments and mobile compatibility.

The combination of content aggregation features and microblogging features also offers a powerful way for groups and organizations to communicate and manage tasks and workflow. FriendFeed Rooms is a great example of this, as it allows RSS feeds, messages, links, images and video to be brought into a “room,” or group page (which may be private/invite only or public), with each new post creating the opportunity for a conversation thread. New activity in the room (new threads, posts, comments or “likes”) can be observed by seeing which thread appears at the top of the page.

FriendFeed Rooms has the power to be a game-changer in the microblogging space, creating an easy-to-use yet powerful communications platform for organizations and web workers while helping to reduce email overload. For example, the contributing writers for louisgray.com (of which I’m a member) use FriendFeed Rooms as a primary point of contact and communication.

ididwork is one of my favorite microblogging services, as it provides a sleek and streamlined approach to short real-time communication and archiving while also providing managers with a great task management feature set. Particularly for distributed work teams, ididwork can provide a basis for communication, information management, and work flow while drastically reducing the headache of wading through hundreds of e-mails each day. ididwork for employees is free while ididwork for managers costs $5 per month.

Are microblogging services reducing the number of your work-related emails?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Photo by Reid Beels

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is put a kettle of water on the stove to make tea. Unlike Captain Picard’s preference for Earl Grey, I stick mostly to green tea to keep me caffeinated. I suspect that most of you have a similar ritual whether you reach for your morning Mt. Dew, tea, coffee, espresso, or a tall, skinny, half-caf, no whip, caramel machiatto from the local coffee shop.

The western obsession with caffeine has some interesting roots. On the NPR Science Friday podcast this week, Steven Johnson talked about how Age of Enlightenment in England coincides with the arrival of caffeine and the growing popularity of coffee shops as places where people with different backgrounds, like Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, came together over coffee and tea to talk about issues and new ideas. The coffee houses also introduced caffeine as a daily habit in people’s lives. At the time, one of the only other safe beverages was alcohol, since the water quality was poor, so some people went from being drunk by mid-morning every day to being caffeinated and alert throughout the day.

The collaborative history of coffee and tea is also interesting, particularly to web workers. Many of us spend our days working in home offices and other places with few people, but the local coffee shop can provide an alternative where we can meet people with diverse interests and different backgrounds. I have a couple of local coffee shops where other web workers tend to gather during the day, and I’ve found myself in interesting conversations with people who work in areas very different from my own. For example, earlier this week, I had an interesting discussion about podcasting with a couple of friends where we were sharing ideas and tips for hosting our video podcasts. I recently had a discussion with another friend about consuming RSS feeds within location based tracking applications.

In many ways, applications like Twitter and FriendFeed are allowing us to have similar cross-discipline discussions with interesting people online acting as at least a partial replacement for the coffee shop. I run across so many links and new technologies as a result of friends posting about them that I would have most likely missed without these applications.

These cross-discipline discussions can inspire new ideas and innovation, just like a science podcast about the invention of air inspired me to write this blog post for web workers.

What are your thoughts on coffee shops as a shared space for interesting discussions? What role does caffeine play in your life as a web worker? What would society be like if caffeine ceased to exist tomorrow?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

In most cases, social networks were not designed specifically with professional applications in mind. Look at MySpace and Facebook, two of the real heavy hitters. Both essentially began as places for friends and family to connect and share. As if it weren’t hard enough to focus on work, if you’re business uses social media, your work tools are designed to distract.

Enter the aggregator. One-stop shopping for all your social networks, or at least those it supports. The hope is that you can eliminate the dreaded window Cycle.

You know the one; you alt-tab, Exposé or click your way through a number of browser windows/tabs and applications, obsessively checking for updates in each. But do aggregators really save you time and attention? Here’s a look at some services, and my experiences with them.

Power.com

Relative newcomer Power.com is still taking its first baby steps, so it’s hard to say for sure how useful this service could eventually become. At the moment, it only supports four services, though they are some of the major players in social networking. Specifically, you can add your Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 and MySpace accounts. Not a perfect storm of social media, to be sure, but a nice enough kick-off lineup.

The Power.com start page is well conceived. Your messages (comments, wall posts, actual messages, etc.) are listed in chronological order in one convenient window. This is a nice feature, since even on individual sites, I don’t like having to root through three or four different screens just to find everything specifically directed at me.

Unfortunately, beyond that, I find there’s little benefit to be had from Power.com. Clicking most links opens the network’s own site, with a Power.com wrapper which is more distracting than helpful. And the presence of obtrusive ads throughout only adds to the visual congestion.

EventBox

This little gem comes by way of The Cosmic Machine. It’s a standalone program, and unfortunately it’s only available for Mac as of this writing, with no publicized plans to make a Windows version.

Eventbox supports Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Pownce (not so important anymore, I guess), Reddit and any RSS feed. It doesn’t provide all of the features and functionality of Facebook, but it does do just enough to satisfy your fleeting moments of curiosity, giving you status and photo updates.

I like this application because it does the work of four I was using previously. It also has the benefit of offering just the basics in a clean interface, so you won’t be tempted to go off on unnecessary tangents. With the upcoming HUD interface, it’ll be even more of a wallflower.

Flock

We’ve mentioned this Mozilla-based browser designed for social networking before. Flock provides unparalleled integration for services like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, flickr, and WordPress. Of the options listed here, this is the only to also support blogging sites, which is a definite plus.

For me, though, Flock offers too much of one and not enough of the other. I find its social networking capabilities too full featured, and liable to distract me from core business activities. Fore web working purposes, I would much rather have the customization options of Firefox add-ons, than the all-encompassing social focus of Flock.

FriendFeed

Now FriendFeed is a tool I can get behind. It’s far more targeted than the other services, in that you define the scope of the information you wish to make available, and information you wish to find. You can use it to make a one stop promotional tool for all or a select portion of your personal and professional endeavors, making it basically a self-updating social media C.V.

On the other side of the coin, you can cut through the static and focus on a single contact, making networking a far more refined affair than digging through your various social networks and trying to assemble the resulting information fragments yourself.

When you get right down to it, social media aggregators should be tools that enable greater control, not distractions that control you. In my opinion, that means being utilitarian in the feature set you offer, and leaving access and update decisions to the user’s discretion.

Do you use social media aggregators in your work? What features would you like to see in future versions/products in this category?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google’s Social Scheme Hinges on Fears, Not Fortunes

I know we are all crunched for time. Sometimes, I don’t even know how I keep up with all of my writing and blogging, client projects and social networking sites. But I have found some cool “social aggregation broadcasting tools” that are making at least some of my tasks easier to handle.

What is a Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tool?

Okay, I have to admit, I just made that term up but I think it covers what I’m trying to convey. There are tools out there that help you aggregate your social networking sites for the purpose of broadcasting a message to more places with fewer steps hence Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tools (SABT? lol!).

These applications are a combination of standalone apps like HelloTxt or ShareThis along with the connectivity features within many of the social networking tools. Some SABTs help you pull all, most or many of your social media sites into one place so all you have to do to broadcast a message the ones you’ve aggregated is to post once within the SABT and the tool distributes that post to your MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. – so easy. Something like ShareThis facilitates a slightly different type of action – allowing your readers to do the distribution of your content for you so I would consider this a Passive SABT.

So I would say there are Active SABTs, Passive SABTs and Integrated SABT functionality like what you get on Utterz, for example. When I post an Utterz, I have my Connections set up so that it automatically posts to my blog and my Twitter page. I can also have it post to my Blip.TV account, Pownce, among others.

Are you with me so far?

On the flip side, Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tools are different from Social Aggregation Listening Tools (SALT?!?) that are sites like FriendFeed that pull together your feeds and the feeds of your “friends” so you can hear what they are Twittering about, Facebook statusing (?!), ad nauseum. But let’s not forget the feed features now on so many of the social networking sites made popular by Facebook and quickly adopted by MySpace, LinkedIn and many others. I’d call those Integrated SALT functionality.

So Where is the Time Management Aspect Here?

Clearly SABTs are the time savers here. Although having your friend feeds from all of their social networks brought into one place for “easy reading” must save someone out there some time, I am still finding SALTs to be the proverbial firehose that I’m trying desperately to drink from before I choke.

Another type of broadcast tool I have not mentioned because it is more of an add-on – although it does save you time – is the tool that allows you to easily post to one of your blogs or social networking sites. These would be tools like Twhirl that lets you post to several Twitter accounts easily. Or any bookmarklet such as Typepad‘s that let’s you post a link and excerpt of an article or blog post you are reading to your own blog or Tweetburner that does the same for Twitter. Or Twitterfeed that let’s you enter your blog RSS and automatically checks your blog for new posts and Tweets them.

Let’s call these Narrow SABTs for right now, not because they are narrow in power but because they are narrow in reach yet still useful. They aren’t mass broadcasting tools but, of course, once you have set up for SABTs properly, posting to your blog once, for example, could trigger a series of automatic actions to broadcast that post with just one click of the Publish button.

The key to remember is that you only need 1 or 2 of each at most to pretty much cover all your social networking bases. So instead of posting to 30 different sites, you shouldn’t be posting more than 4-6 times at most to get full broadcasting distribution. And for those using the most popular social networks, you can probably get that down to 2-3 posts. That means you publish the same post in 2-3 SABTs and those 2-3 actions then reach over 10x that many sites instantly. Then you add on the Passive SABTs and the potential reach of your post grows exponentially as others share your content for you.

These are the SABTs that I personally use.

Active SABTs

1. HelloTxt – Covers Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Meemi, Beemood, Gozub, Frazr, Numpa, Mexicodiario, Fanfou, Feecie, Hi5, Bebo, Myspace, Brightkite, at press time

Passive SABTs

1. ShareThis – Allows others to share your content on Reddit, Facebook, del.icio.us, Technorati, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Windows Live, SlashDot, N4G, Blinklist, ma.gnolia, Digg, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! MyWeb, Propeller, Newsvine, Mixx, Furl, Mister Wong, Faves, Simpy, Yigg, Fresqui, Care2, Kirtsy…

2. AddThis – Readers can post your share your content on Google Bookmarks, Delicious, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Furl, Yahoo MyWeb, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine, Live, Technorati, Twitter, Yahoo Bookmarks, myAOL, Ask, Fark, Slashdot, Propeller, Mixx, Multiply, Simpy, Blogmarks, Diigo, Faves (Bluedot), Spurl, Link-a-Gogo, Mister Wong, FeedMeLinks, Backflip, Magnolia, Seganlo, Netvouz, Tailrank, Blinklist, and..

Integrated SABT features

1. Utterz – Let’s you form “Connections” with Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, Twitter, WordPress, Movable Type, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, Twitxr, Drupal, LiveSpaces, YouTube, MetaWeblog API, Pownce and Blip.TV as of press time

Narrow SABTs

1. Twhirl – Have more than one Twitter account (like me)? This desktop app let’s you open a tiny window for each to cross post when/where appropriate.

2. Tweetburner – If you are reading something interesting that is worth tweeting about, click this bookmarklet, add your comments, then Tweet.

3. Twitterfeed – Use this tool app to link your blog and Twitter account so a single blog post can Tweet automatically.

What are you using to save time and manage your social network postings?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4