Meet Firestatus

... a status update utility for multiple social networks. So, what 's this all about? The story goes like this: You see a cool page on the net and you 'd like to share it with your friends or you just want to update your status, the "Good morning, I just woke up" kind of twit. But your friends don't seem to have reached a consensus about THE social network. So, some of them use facebook, some other use twitter, some use friendfeed and you go on and on and on. What do you do to share the cool link with all of your friends (assuming that you have accounts in all of their networks)? You go to each and every social network page and write the same text again and again ? No. You need a client that can communicate with as many networks as possible and send the update to all. I certainly had that need. However the few clients I had seen didn't do the job exactly as I had imagined. My main problem is that even with multi-network clients I have to write the update and send it separately to each network. Why can't I write the text once and send it to all networks with just one click ? It can't be that difficult. Why don't we create such a client as a firefox extension (we are top engineers after all) ? So I discussed the idea with my friends, XUL and Javascript experts, Panagiotis and Dionysios (the best way to solve a problem is to find the people to solve it for you :-)) and here it is. It took us several weeks because we couldn't dedicate much time to the project but in the process we added friendfeed (instead of only twitter and facebook) and Panagiotis added the notification functionality (it 's a good thing to see what your friends are doing on twitter :-). So now we are waiting for your feedback and we are open to suggestions. We plan to add features like the unread notifications list and of course more networks like linkedin, del.icio.us, etc. Every network with a public API is a candidate. And don't forget to leave a (positive :-)) review here.

What I read and liked on 2008-09-23

Why Isn’t Facebook Making More Money? (Hint: Advertiser Value and User Value Are Not Aligned) - Publishing 2.0
Apart from finding some old friends from high school, I couldn't find any real value to facebook.

What I read and liked on 2008-08-31

Interoperability Happens - The Never-Ending Debate of Specialist v. Generalist