Aggregation

FriendFeed is leaving private beta tonight and opening up to everyone. It's a potentially useful service that aggregates what your friends are doing around the Web into one big feed you can easily scan. In other words, if you've got friends who Twitter, friends who post photos on Flickr, friends who favorite videos on YouTube, and friends who tag music on Last.fm or sites on del.icio.us, this service will keep track of them all. Except what your pals are doing on Facebook--that service was not scannable by FriendFeed in the beta version I tried.

The … Read more

Not everyone should let their co-workers see their full online social profile, as this guy would likely attest.

Moli.com, which already has a solution for individuals who want to control who sees their profile, is now expanding its service as a platform for enterprise users.

A single account can have public (anyone can see), private (it can be searched for, but not accessed), and hidden (only those with permission from the account holder can see it exists) versions. The aim is to increase privacy.

Moli offers white label, private label, and co-branded versions for businesses.

Companies that purchase the … Read more

Education.com aims to be the WebMD for parents looking for information about children. It does that by aggregating the most-searched for content on the Web related to kids: schools, activities, behavioral issues, and more.

The product the company is launching at Demo is School Finder, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Using already available information that Education.com has gathered in one place, users can search public, private, and charter schools. It has rankings based on test scores as well as parent opinions. It tracks information on school demographics and after-school activities. The tool also displays schools based … Read more

One thing Pownce is still missing after opening up earlier this week is a public feed. While the creators have hand-picked a selection of mostly San Francisco socialites for everyone to view on its main page, there's not a simple way to pull together some of the hottest activity on the site short of tapping into the API. An enterprising developer Bryan Pearson has done just that, creating Powncememe, a site that rates people's Pownce messages based on various characteristics including user ratings, the number of recipients, and replies from other users. When combined it's a fun … Read more

My favorite start page, Netvibes, is getting an interesting upgrade. The new "Ginger" version gets social features for sharing your start-page widgets and layouts, as well as a status feed reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter. Netvibes Ginger also makes it easier to add content to your pages.

The site will be updated with the Ginger release in mid-February, but we have some invitations to the private beta now...read down to the end for details.

With Ginger, all Netvibes users get a "universe" page--a public, shared collection of widgets and tabs that anyone can access. Here's a quick example. … Read more

What's the hottest way to save face in today's eco-conscious, Jolie-Pitt-and-Project-Red world? Donate to charity, of course.

The Huffington Post, the online news outlet founded in 2005 by pundit Arianna Huffington and AOL veteran Ken Lerer, has managed to tick some people off because the site doesn't pay its army of bloggers. Since then, the company has attempted to justify that stance as accusations of greed and poor ethics (and of course the term "sweatshop") have been thrown rather liberally around the blogosphere.

"Think about the bloggers as op-ed page writers," Huffington said … Read more

This morning Netvibes is launching Premium Universes, a new program for businesses to get their own branded start page that can be integrated into their existing site, without jettisoning users off elsewhere. The intent is for site users to get the same functionality they'd get at Netvibes.com, while at the site owner's page. Site owners in turn, can place as much advertising outside of the Netvibes page as they'd like, supplementing the use of the service--and hopefully their revenue.

In terms of features, there's really nothing new from the Netvibes Universe program that launched in mid-April. … Read more

Yesterday Google rolled out video alerts to its Google Alerts service. If you've never used Alerts, it's a handy way to get Web content updates delivered straight to your e-mail inbox based on keywords. In the case of the new video search, Google will deliver links to videos it's indexed. So how is this helpful? Say you're a big video fan, and you dig seeing those Diet Coke and Mentos videos online. There are always some crazy teenagers out in the suburbs doing new things with them, and that equates to a lot of new videos. … Read more

News aggregation community Digg has announced a number of new features designed to take the site's social networking beyond simply "digging" and "burying" headlines and blog entries.

Starting Wednesday night, members of the site can further customize their account profiles so that they more closely resemble something on a social-networking site--more personal information, bigger photos, and a more extensive record of site activity. They will also be able to use their friends lists as content filters so that their "social news" comes from a select group rather than the Digg community as a … Read more