Media Blog

Social aggregation service Cliqset has launched two new tools for tracking your friends’ activities on the bevy of social sites that make up the real-time web.

The company has released a desktop app for discovering shared items like status updates, photos or videos — and all the discussions related to those posts — across the dozens of sites Cliqset supports. Also announced Tuesday morning is Cliqset’s new social app for Boxee which lets you chat with your friends while you’re watching videos culled from around the web.

The Boxee app is cool, but the new desktop client is the bigger deal. It’s a slick application that improves upon similar apps already on the market, and we’d recommend you take it for a spin if you’re a social web power user.

Cliqset’s new desktop app is a lot like Tweetdeck, the popular app for following activity on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Like Tweetdeck and other aggregation apps like Seesmic Desktop, Cliqset’s app is build with AIR, Adobe’s platform based on Flash that runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.

But while Tweetdeck and other similar apps only pull status updates from Twitter and couple of other sites, Cliqset pulls all activities and updates from the bulk of the social web. You can see photos, videos, comments, likes, and ratings from Flickr, StumbleUpon, Picasa, Delicious and what have you — over 70 social websites are supported. You can cross-post to multiple services, filter posts by type and create custom groups to better track your friends. This brings Cliqset’s app very close to the web-based experience the company offers on its website.

Note: the AIR apps from the likes of Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Yammer are more mature, and thus more stable, than the beta Cliqset is releasing Tuesday. Expect hiccups.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Cliqset relaunched its website as a full-fledged aggregation hub, complete with a user interface that auto-refreshes as new items are shared, new statuses are posted or new comments are made across any of the social sites you belong to. It’s still in beta, but you can sign up for access. The site serves as a single point of entry into the real-time web, a model that’s become increasingly attractive as more of our online social activity moves onto services that provide instant access to information. Twitter and Facebook are some familiar examples, but Google is also getting into the real-time game with its new Wave collaboration tool and recent enhancements to Google Docs which allow groups to instantly share document updates more easily.

Cliqset is doing more than jumping on the real-time bandwagon here, though.

Much of the data flowing across the social web gets broadcast in code that doesn’t interact well with other services. This becomes a problem when a developer wants to create an app that pulls in data from multiple services. Cliqset’s platform — which both its website and the new desktop client take advantage of — actually re-writes much of that code in the Activity Streams format, an emerging standard data format for exchanging updates on the social web. So, Cliqset’s platform is actually picking up the streams of data from the social web and ensuring they’re well-formed before making them available freely to anyone.

The company has another advantage working for it, but it’s largely coincidental.

Much of the spotlight for real-time web aggregation in the past few months has been hogged, deservedly so, by FriendFeed. The service rocketed to popularity earlier this year before being purchased by Facebook. Facebook says it plans on keeping FriendFeed alive and humming as-is, but the service will most likely eventually be folded into Facebook’s experience and cease to exist as a stand-alone site.

There’s been much speculation about where fans of FriendFeed — who may or may not be fans of Facebook’s proprietary authentication system or its protective data-sharing policies — will go once FriendFeed disappears or becomes a less friendly place to share one’s social assets. Plaxo is one possible destination. Though we haven’t seen it, Threadsy appears to have promise.

Cliqset remains a very strong contender, and this desktop app should win the service some new fans.

We’re still waiting on native Cliqset apps for the iPhone and Android. When those arrive, which should be soon, we expect Cliqset to really take off.

• Cliqset Relaunches, Joins the Real-Time Streaming Club
• Google Docs, Google Groups Catch the Real-Time Sharing Wave
• Facebook Open Sources ‘Tornado’ the Engine That Drives FriendFeed
• Let’s Be Friends: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
• Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps

Mozilla’s lead designer believes it’s time to rethink the way people browse bookmarks in Firefox. Taking a cue from the way favorite pages are displayed in other web browsers, he has proposed that future versions of Firefox should include a way to access your bookmarks and browsing history directly from the home tab — without a sidebar, and without a new window.

Of course, Firefox 3.0 completely changed the way we access our bookmarks, browsing history and other data by making all that information available through the “Awesome bar,” the smart URL location bar at the top of the browser window. It doubles as a search box — type a phrase, a word or even just a letter and Firefox can quickly find the web page you’re looking for. It is a powerful piece of testimony about how much search has shaped our expectations on the web.

But when it comes to browsing your bookmarks and history, Firefox remains largely unchanged since the the browser first launched years ago. Sure, there’s some new tagging features and a slightly slicker interface, but the basic premise — opening a sidebar to access your history or your bookmarks in a list — is the same in Firefox 3.5 as it was in Firefox 1.0.

Mozilla’s Principal Designer for Firefox, Alex Faaborg, says it’s time to rethink the whole experience.

“We want users to be able to navigate from the home tab into the bookmark folders and tags that they have specifically created,” Faaborg writes in a recent blog post.

What that means, from an interface design standpoint, is that future versions of Firefox will likely include a way to get to your bookmarks directly from the home tab, not through a sidebar, and not inside a new window. Your bookmarks, visually speaking, become part of the web, what Faaborg calls “your own personal web.”

To understand what Faaborg is getting at, consider the two basic ways you can find what you’re looking for on a computer: browsing and searching. The Awesomebar falls in the searching category, while your bookmarks, whether viewed as a list in a drop-down menu or in a sidebar panel is a browsing interface.

Faaborg is simply suggesting that there are better ways of browsing than drop down menus and sidebars.

Faaborg’s early mockups for a revamped bookmark experience in Firefox look very similar to the start page popularized by Opera’s Speed Dial feature. That is, a grid view of your bookmarked sites with thumbnail previews and URLs. A similar approach has been adopted by Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome.

The difference in this case is that while Speed Dial and its clones display your most frequently visited sites, Faaborg’s design shows all your bookmarks.

The advantage of a Speed Dial-type interface for bookmarks isn’t just ease of access and speed, it also means getting to your bookmarks could be as simple as hitting the back button. For example, if you were browsing your bookmarks as a thumbnail list and you clicked through to read a site, hitting the back button would return you to the thumbnails page.

Arguably the sidebar allows you to do something similar — clicking from one site to the next. But the sidebar hogs screen real estate and if Jakob Nielsen taught us nothing else, he certainly proved that the back button is fundamental UI element of the web.

Faaborg’s proposed interface doesn’t just add the back button to the mix, it also has a huge potential when hooked up to Weave, Mozilla’s still experimental syncing tool for Firefox. Imagine being able to sit down at any PC, sign in to Weave and have a browsable display of your bookmarks appear at your finger tips. Of course, as Faaborg acknowledges, there are some privacy hurdles Weave would need to work out before that scenario is a reality, but the plumbing is there.

There’s no guarantee that these mock-ups will make it into the next version of Firefox, but regardless of when they arrive, we’re looking forward to having better ways of accessing our bookmarks.

See Also:

• Mozilla Shows What’s to Come in Firefox 3.6 Alpha Release
• Future Firefox Features: Better Awesome Bar, HTML 5 Support
• Firefox 3.1 Will Add More Awesomeness to the ‘Awesome Bar’