Brad McConahay

While reading tech news stories, I often see writers mention that RSS feeds are becoming irrelevant due to the increasing popularity of Twitter and Facebook, and the ability to get news through their feeds.  They would have you believe that RSS feeds and readers are on the way out, but I think quite the opposite is true.

It’s definitely possible that Twitter, or Facebook, or some new service will figure out a different way to format article links and titles embedded in updates in a predictable way that some new type of aggregator will be able to save for you.  But why would anybody do that when RSS is already ubiquitous.  Until these social networking feeds become strictly channelized, it’s tough to pull out every article from all your favorite news sources.  Even then, it still feels very kludgy to try and form the output of a Twitter feed into something as useful as RSS already is.

On a larger scale, I’m not convinced that the Twitter model will last in its current form anyway.  I’ve heard people whose opinions I respect say that Twitter will soon be the “new dial tone.”  It would be fun to think so, and I believe its style of communication will carve out a permanent place on the Internet, I just don’t think people will find it useful for everything.  Like so many technologies before Twitter – blogs, push, frames, chatrooms, and even RSS comes to mind – they’ve all found a their uses within the big picture, but they haven’t overtaken as some completely new and dominant paradigm like these writers would seem to imply.  They also say that the new attention-scattered generation is why Twitter will eventually take over, but it doesn’t appear that teens really care about these services more than their older counterparts.

Honestly, I’m not sure they know the scope of what they’re saying when they flippantly mention that RSS is becoming irrelevant.  Based on past experience, I wouldn’t look for the little orange RSS icons to go away any time soon.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

There are applications that attempt to combine all your social networking accounts and activity into one package. The first two that come to mind are FriendFeed and Flock. FriendFeed is a web-based service that aggregates all your social networking feeds into one single feed, and also provides self-contained conversational commenting. Flock is a desktop application that allows complete interaction with all of your social networking accounts, and includes a web browser to boot. Both handle a wide variety of services and work very well at what they do, but I’ve never found I like to use them on a day-to-day basis.

Multiple IM Clients

Then there are the multiple IM clients that have been popular for a few years. The most popular of these are the Pidgin open source project, formerly known as Gaim, and Trillian, an application that comes in both free and paid versions. Pidgin has a vanilla interface but handles all the popular IM protocols in one IM client. They recently came out with a plug-in for Facebook chat, as well. By comparison, Trillian is a very slick and skinnable application that also handles many IM protocols in one spot. Both of them also offer an interface to IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I used the Pidgin client as my only multiple IM client for many years.

The Best of Both Worlds

Then I discovered Digsby. Digsby aims to do the best of both types of applications. You get the multiple IM goodness of Pidgin and Trillian, along with lightweight interfaces for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace. You can have it notify you on varying and configurable levels any time there’s a new update in any of the feeds, as well as post your own updates. It will also notify of you new email for any email accounts that you specify.

Surely different people have different needs, and there may be those who still prefer to run each IM client and Social Network interface individually. But I’ve found that Digsby handles the perfect combination of what I do every day, and has made for a great everyday IM/Social Networking client.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

When Microsoft first announced their new search engine and Google competitor, Bing, back in late May, I didn’t really give it much thought. I still don’t. In fact, I don’t personally know any non-techie person who has brought it up in general conversation. While that may not change, it might be worth examining a few noteworthy aspects of Bing.

• Microsoft is billing Bing as a “decision engine.”
• It uses attractive and lightweight graphics. For people who want an interesting design on their search engine interface, this may be a plus.
• They’re experimenting with Real Time Search. For now, this just means they’re including recently posted Twitter content from a few celebrities and tech industry personalities. But real-time search is a hot topic at the moment and they’re actually doing something with it.
• For developers and webmasters, Bing provides an API (Application Programming Interface) and some basic tools.

It’s also worth noting that Bing has taken one percent of the search market share from Google since their announcement. From April to June, Google’s market share fell from 79.1% to 78.5%. Yahoo remained consistent at 11%, and Microsoft went from 7.2% to 8.2%.

It seems hard to imagine anybody dethroning Google as the king of search, but with a Yahoo redesign/rebranding also due in the fall, it will be interesting to see how the search engine space race continues to develop!

In the meantime, here are a few links to some of the more lively news stories Bing has been creating:

Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us! (wired.com)

Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it (The Register)

Google Does Not Mock Bing (Vijay Gill)

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)