Abhishek Tiwari

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Do you post tweets on Twitter? Do you upload pictures to Flickr? Do you post videos on YouTube? Can’t get enough blogging done in a day? Then FriendFeed is just the right thing for you and your friends.

Built with the same concept as “News Feed” on Facebook, FriendFeed let’s you aggregate your activities and subscribe to all the activities of your friends. Once configured FriendFeed accesses your activity from the external service(s) via back-end custom integrations. The data is retrieved periodically and aggregated into a unified stream of activities. Your friends and family then can subscribe to this aggregated feed and access all your activities across multiple services.

Unlike other RSS feed splicers, FriendFeed has implemented custom integrations to external services to offer access to various types of activities. For example once configured FriendFeed can access your blog posts, new media from YouTube / Flickr, new Diggs, new DVD selections at Netflix and many more.

As a user not only you can aggregate your feed, you can also subscribe to aggregated feeds of other interesting individuals. The service then allows you to comment on specific feed items or like / dislike it. This encourages community interactions between the users and their subscribers.

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Hot off the press, Amazon AWS has yet another new web service. This one is called DevPay and is squarely aimed at entrepreneurial developers. Frankly these guys are punching out web services by the dozen.

I particularly like this service as it allowing the developer to further focus on the applications and leave the business aspects to DevPay. Developers can enable applications using other services like S3, EC2 and SimpleDB. Once the apps are ready they can use DevPay to sell them with creative business models.

Many web service providers end up using credit cards or PayPal, which require some effort to configure appropriately. Not to mention security and privacy hassles when dealing with credit card transactions. Seems like DevPay simplifies all that.

Go ahead and check it out yourself. With these new offerings, the AWS portfolio is getting quite potent and headed towards next generation of hosting. I may have to follow-up with a detailed post.

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I have been away for a week due to some server issues. Now that those are resolved I am back with the post on latest announcement from Amazon. As you know Amazon has been pushing the web-services agenda for quite some time now. By enabling S3 and EC2 among other services they have had significant success in this space. On Friday they added a powerful weapon in their armory.

SimpleDB, the latest entrant into the AWS portfolio is a web-services database for structured storage. Typical databases use SQL type query language to add, modify and delete data in a structured fashion. SimpleDB simplifies this by enabling a web-services interface on top of such a “cloud-based” database.

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I haven’t done much weekly wrap ups on this blog. However the past week was pretty interesting. That’s why I am thinking of introducing a weekly post where I cover some of the salient stories for the week.

Google Officially in the Race

Google, who has been dabbling with the idea of participating in the FCC’s 700 MHZ auction, finally confirmed their participation on Friday. This comes after various discussions on this topic during most of 2007. The news was first broken by WSJ.

Here is some of my previous coverage around Google’s wireless plans.

• Rise of The GoogNet
• Rise of the GoogNet — Part 2
• Rise of GoogNet — Part 3, Well Sort Of…
• More stories

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As you know from few posts on this blog, I am a huge supporter of user’s owning their social graphs. Over multiple posts, I have been laying out the need for a consolidated service, which hosts the graph (along with identity) for a user.

Last week this discussion caught some steam with some great posts by Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Winer. Dave’s post made me think that the data ownership problem is bigger than just the graph. Theoretically a user owns all the content they generate on any of these services. You know, things like Amazon ratings, YouTube videos, etc. While I don’t see anyone having the need for getting an XML file with this content for personal use. I do see them wanting to use this data on other services. For example (from Dave’s post) one can use their movie ratings at NetFlix and use it with Vudu or share it with their friends on Facebook.

This thought process clearly reflects that there are many graphs (social or otherwise) within many dimensions of services on the web. Every new service with any user generated content is creating a new graph. I talked about the need for consolidating the access to this graph in my last post. Given the dispersed nature of the graphs it will be pretty unrealistic for any web service to physically do that. Hence in this post I am recommending a slightly different mechanism whereby we can enable an ecosystem on the web and achieve the same results. So here it goes:

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