Software

AOL completed its acquisition of social networking site Bebo today. You may remember that AOL announced it would buy Bebo for $850 million back in March. According to InformationWeek Bebo will be the center of AOL’s new People Network business unit. Heading up this business unit is Joanna Shields who will serve as president. This “People Network” will consist of three AOL services: AIM, ICQ, and now Bebo.

While Bebo is most popular in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand, AOL is hoping grow this upcoming social network in the US. Silicon Alley Insider seems to think AOL will layoff employees working in the AIM/ICQ division due to the restructuring process.

What do you think? Did AOL make a good decision? Do you think this acquisition puts AIM at risk? Be sure to voice your opinion in the comments!

Disclaimer: AOL is the parent company of Weblogs, Inc. which owns DownloadSquad.

[via InformationWeek]

Opera has released a report on the state of the mobile web. And considering the company claims more than 44 million users for its Opera Mini cellphone web browser, Opera’s in as good a position as any company to report on mobile web usage.

There are two trends that are particularly noteworthy. First, 77% of all traffic was to full web pages, not stripped down mobile pages. This probably shouldn’t be that surprising, since Opera Mini renders full pages pretty quickly and lets users zoom in and out to read the fine print. And while WAP might have been pretty exciting a few years ago when there wasn’t as much rich media content on the web, and when mobile internet connections were significantly slower, those days are long gone.

The second trend is a bit more surprising. 40% of worldwide traffic was directed to social networks. In some countries including the US, South Africa, and Indonesia, that number was as high as 60%. Now, it’s not like we didn’t know that social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Bebo were popular. We just didn’t figure people would be spending half of their mobile web browsing time visiting them.

What sites do you visit regularly with your mobile web browser?

[via VentureBeat]

Believe us when we say that we know you’re sick of hearing about Twitter, but there’s a good reason it’s one of Download Squad’s favorite toys. We often find out about new software on Twitter before it gets blogged anywhere else, and the readers reap all the benefits. And did we mention that some people’s Twitter streams are flat-out hilarious? Favrd, a new service from Dean Allen, will help you find some of the best. It keeps track of which posts people are marking as favorites, so you only have to read the good stuff.

Dean also uses a mysterious algorithm to filter out “webcock,” a term he coined to describe “online-marketing, web-strategy, killer-startup cheerleaders/water-carriers.” This is sure to offend some people, but it keeps the focus of Favrd on people who use Twitter to entertain. To put it another way, a way that probably wouldn’t make it past Dean’s algorithm, Favrd is crowdsourcing comedy, and everybody wins.

Desktop social networking client Sociagami has added two features that were noticeably absent from earlier builds: Twitter integration and support for updating your status from the application. When we first looked at Sociagami a few months ago, the software provided an attractive (but RAM-heavy) tool for interacting with your Facebook and MySpace contacts. You could see all of the latest status updaes in one place, navigate through your friend list in a slick browser, or view the latest photos uploaded by your contacts.

But without the ability to update your own status, Sociagami wasn’t nearly as useful as other desktop social networking tools like Digsby. The latest version includes a handy status update tool that lets you post to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter simultaneously. If you only want to update one service, just uncheck two of the boxes.

The new Twitter client works pretty much exactly as you’d expect. You get a list of recent messages from your contacts in one window, and you can sift through your contact list in the browser. One thing that sets Sociagami apart from Digsby is the fact that you can see all of your latest Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook messages in a single window.

But while Digsby already has a reputation as a RAM-heavy application, at least that utility also gives you email notification alerts and an instant messenger application, two features that Sociagami lacks. Still, we’re happy to report that Sociagami continues to get a bit better with each release, so we’re not ready to give up on this application just yet.

Six Apart has released a new Facebook Application called Blog It that lets users write blog posts directly from Facebook. That in and of itself wouldn’t be particularly exciting or useful. But here’s the cool part. You can also associate Blog It with your accounts on multiple blogging and micro-blogging platforms so that you can update a series of blogs from one location.

Blog It supports TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Moveable Type, WordPress, Tumblr, Pownce, Vox, and Twitter. Users can choose to simply use the application to simultaneously (or individually) update their status messages on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, or other micro-blogging services. Or you can write a full blog post, have it show up on your various blogs, and send out a quick note through Twitter, Pownce, and your Facebook news feed to let your friends know you’ve got a new post up.

You can check out a demo video after the jump.

[via Mashable]

Facebook has rolled out two new features. The first is a Google Trends style tool called Lexicon that lets you graph popular keywords that have appeared on Facebook profiles, groups, and walls. The second is the addition of third party data to Facebook Mini-Feeds.

The graph feature is pretty much self explanatory. You enter a term, and Facebook will show you how frequently it pops up on the site. Enter two terms, separate by a comma, and you can compare their popularity. The Mini-Feed update is a little more interesting, but only a little. Users can now associate their Facebook accounts with Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us so that pictures, reviews, and links they post to those sites will be added to their Facebook feeds.

The move seems designed to help Facebook compete with a number of new “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! which allow users to track updates from across a series of social networks. The difference between Facebook and those other sites is that FriendFeeed and Socialthing! let you track far more than 4 networks. Where’s Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Reddit, and YouTube?

It should be interesting to see if Facebook fleshes out its lifestreaming features in the future. It would seem to be in the company’s best interest to do so. Because if users decide that it’s easier to keep track of their social networking data while visiting a 3rd party site like FriendFeed, that means they’ll be spending less time at Facebook’s page, which means less advertising revenue.

Looking for a quick way to conduct a poll? Online polling service PollDaddy has added a new Twitter feature that lets you ask a group of people what you should have for lunch, who you should vote for, or anything in between.

Users can set up a poll in a matter of seconds. Just visit the web site, type a short question, and select a few possible answers. You’ll need to enter your Twitter login information in order to send out the poll. PollDaddy will automatically shorten the URL and send out a tweet under your name.

We’re guessing that most users will either see your poll the moment you post it or they won’t see it at all, so this service will be great for Twitter users with a large number of followers who need to get some information quickly. But you can also post links to your poll on a web page or pretty much anywhere else, so you could theoretically use PollDaddy’s Twitter feature to gather information over time as well.

[via WebWare]

Over the past year, Twitter has become an increasingly important source of news and communication for technology bloggers. If you sign up for a Twitter account and follow a few of your favorite tech writers, odds are you’ll get links to interesting stories they’ve written and articles they’re reading as well as a lot of back and forth discourse between writers, writers and readers, and a whole slew of other people. It’s that last part that can make Twitter seem overwhelming.

If you were thinking of signing up for Twitter just for the tech news, but don’t have the time to sit in front of your computer all day sifting through all the other stuff, TwitLinks can help. TwitLinks basically monitors the tweets from a group of influential tech bloggers and then lays them out in an easy to read format. Each article get a link, a first paragraph, and a link to the Twitter user who shared the link. Some, but not all, articles also have a thumbnail image.

The result is a page that works sort of like Techmeme, in that it gives you a sense of what stories tech bloggers are talking about. But there several things that set TwitLinks apart from Techmeme. First of all, TwitLinks monitors the Techmeme Twitter account, so you’ll actually find Techmeme stories at TwitLinks. Second, there’s no threading, which means you can’t see the pile-on effect that happens when one blog or news source discovers a story and then dozens of others grab ahold.

Probably the best thing about TwitLinks is that you can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed and just read the latest high tech tweets from the comfort of your RSS reader. No Twitter account needed.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

FriendFeed is a service that keeps track of the activity of your contacts across pretty much every social network. The problem with FriendFeed is that people want to view different sets of contacts in different ways. There are third party desktop clients for Twitter and Pownce, for example, that let you follow along and respond to comments more easily. But when you lump those services in with less-immediate ones like Yelp, Flickr, or the RSS feed to your friend’s blog, the slower stuff starts to gum up the works.

Alert Thingy to the rescue! If you use FriendFeed, and you’ve been looking for a faster way to read updates, you’re in luck: a desktop version is here. Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application, which gives it the advantage of being lightweight and cross-platform. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles to it, but it will display your feed and allow you post items directly to FriendFeed.

Twitter’s a great way to keep up with your friends latest thoughts and activities — if you have just a few friends to follow or if you spend every waking moment monitoring Twitter. But if you follow a few hundred people and happen to walk away from your computer or mobile device for more than a few minutes, odds are you’ll miss a ton of messages.

CrowdStatus makes it easier to make sure you don’t miss tweets, by letting you organize your contacts into groups. Say you follow 100 people, but there are 10 people whose every word you want to read, another 10 who are usually good for a laugh, but aren’t as critical, and 80 who you’re just following to be polite since they already followed you. You can create three different groups and when you’re in a hurry, just click the high priority group to display the latest messages from your top 10 list.

You can also share your group URLs with the world, letting everyone see the latest updates from Download Squad bloggers, for example.

Another tool we ran across which lets you visualize your Twitter messages in a new way is Gridgit. It’s not quite as versatile as CrowdStatus, but Gridjit displays your latest messages according to user instead of in chronological order, making it easier to track the last few messages from each of your contacts. If you’re willing to give up your password, you can also post to Twitter directly from Gridjit.

[via Blog Herald and WebWare]