A fairly negative review of Digg's new recommendation algorithm.

Quoted: The [recommendation] Engine identifies Diggers like you to present stuff you might like, so keep Digging to get better recommendations.

Quoted: Digg's long awaited recommendation engine is now live for some users, which luckily includes me. It's time to take a look at what this new feature brings to

newsgator has a SharePoint extension called Social Sites, that creates a personal profile, recommends friends and feeds via common interests and tags, and also uses Social Bookmarking to bring in content from outside the sharepoint site.

New Ning competitor. No Ads!

Really excellent guest-post on TechCrunch detailing the data structures on FaceBook, and what the TOS allows applications to export from the FB platform (more than you think).

Quoted: The following guest post was written by Dan Birdwhistell, founder of people directory Bigsight (reviewed here) and creator of Hacking Facebook, a website ...

Nice list of social bookmarking sites, sorted by (published) PageRank. Does a nice job of grouping sites into tiers by popularity. Faves is listed as a PR6 site.

This new site is TMZ with an eye to fashion and product endorsements. It looks like editors upload photos of celebrities using/endorsing various products, and users get to look at those, and make purchases.

Seems like a clear revenue model, but it's not clear to me why users would return here - are they going to compete with TMZ and try to break stories about celebs? If the gossip component is missing, I don't see how it will draw in repeat visitors.

Quoted: Coolspotters is the definitive source for discovering and sharing the products and brands used by your favorite celebrities - in their real lives and in other parts of pop culture such as movies, television, and music. And that's just the beginning...

Badges for conferences.

Gary clued me in to this service - which is kind of the flip side of the Friend Feed equation - "How do I DISTRIBUTE all my feeds out to different information sinks".

I found through personal experience that just hooking up feeds and blasting everything everywhere does NOT work - it's too noisy to send everything I'm doing to Facebook status updates or Twitter, for example.

Ping.FM uses some "triggers" to direct your posts to the desired locations:

@s message - Posts a status update
@b title^body - Posts a blog
@m message - Posts a micro-blog

Quoted: Ping.fm is a simple service that allows you to post to multiple social networks with a single message.

Friend feed's allows 3rd party access to your account, by use of a secret key for each account. With the key, the external service can access your Friend Feed account on your behalf.

It's a single key for all applications - so not as flexible as OpenSocial in that you can revoke an application-specific key.