As we noted just earlier today, Facebook have released an API for the newsfeed making it possible to essentially recreate your Facebook news stream elsewhere. Personally (as a geek), I’m delighted. Deep down however, for the average user, I’m concerned.

See, the news is likely to generate a mass of new interest from geeks and web enthusiasts, many of whom had hoped access to their personal streams would be available outside of Facebook. This of course is wonderful for Facebook and wonderful for other tech heads like me too.

For non-geeks however, the news (once they find out about it) is likely to confuse and quite possibly scare. Most non-geeks simply won’t be aware of the fact that their updates, which include media, are actually going to available to users outside of Facebook.com. Most non-geeks aren’t even aware of the fact that they can customize their Facebook privacy levels to a tilt, and even if they are, they’re unlikely to know how to do so.

The Difference

There’s an enormous difference between Facebook and Twitter which Facebook appears yet to realise, or has simply forgotten. Facebook stores an incredible amount of information from peoples daily lives, including media, personal and contact information. Whenever any of this changes, it appears on your friends news streams BY DEFAULT. Pardon the capitals, but the point needs stressing, Facebook members need to therefore realise that virtually everything they put on Facebook is now going to be made available outside of Facebook, destroying this private network of sharing they have all come to expect and appreciate.

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Facebook have just announced news of a dramatic change to Facebook’s core offering, the news stream.

Via the new Open Stream API, developers can create applications to read and interact with the stream, as you would do on Facebook.com.

“With these new methods, you can access the stream on behalf of a user and then filter, remix, and display the stream back to that user however you choose, wherever you choose, in the manner most relevant for the user experience. Other new API methods will allow users to both publish into the stream and to add comments and ‘likes’ to posts in the stream.”

This means desktop applications like Seesmic Desktop (who already have it (partly) integrated) and web based apps like Friendfeed can interact directly with the Facebook news stream (via a single API call apparently).

The guys at Web Designer Depot put together a list of screenshots from various Operating Systems dating back nearly 30 years. If you haven’t had a browse already ensure you do, otherwise have a skim of our selection below including the latest Windows 7 release.

Xerox 8010 Star (released in 1981)

Apple Lisa Office System 1 (released in 1983)

Windows 2.0x (released in 1987)

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Update: Alex Hoye also tweeted his way through the marathon with  mass of interesting tweets and twitpics. Thanks @amanda

Peter Wilkinson, a digital news producer at CNN.com in London, decided he would add a little spice to his London Marathon run by tweeting throughout.

Completing the course in 3 hours 30 minutes – under his four hour goal – Wilkinson tweeted frequently via text message. He was initially concerned texting and running would prove difficult, however he told CNN it was far easier than he had expected.

“My main problem is going to be not crashing into other people,” he said.

He hoped tweeting would “detract attention” from the race and felt that the extra attention may also be a good way to help the charity he supported, Amnesty International.

note. You can support Wilkinson and Amnesty International by donating here.

The Time Magazine competition included the likes of President Barack Obama, the Dali Lama, Vladaimir Putin, however it is Christopher Poole (aka Moot), founder of web forum 4chan, who has been named the most influential person in the world.

The vote for the most influential person in the world was made available to anyone and according to The Inquisitr, Moot received 16,794,368 votes for an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100). Runner up, Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, received 2,316,278 votes with an influence rating of 47/ 100.

The screenshot below does not reflect the final number of votes, but does accurately reflect the order when voting was finalized. 

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and more over at StartupSigns.com

Created by passionate Twitterer and American comedian Andy Milonakis, “Let Me Twitter Dat” is an anthem that’s bound to spread through Twitter like no track before. Enjoy.

If there’s anything u.nu has going for it, it’s its URL, it’s short..very very short. It works exactly the same way other short URL services work (minus the bookmarklet).

Visit the site, enter the URL you’re looking to shorten and voila the shortest short URL you’re liking to come across, e.g. http://u.nu/6e.

Although it doesn’t provide the quality of analytics you’ll find with short URL services such as bit.ly and is.gd but by entering a “?” after the short u.nu URL (e.g. http://u.nu/6e?).  you’ll see a few basic stats such as original URL, date created and number of times used.

Via the Apps Room on Friendfeed, i’ve also discovered there’s r.im and a.gd

Whilst we’re on the topic of short URL’s, I highly recommend reading our post on the industry here.

Clicky, we’ve covered before (here and here), and within good reason, its product offering and reliability is second to none and makes it THE analytics app of the moment.

Whilst its focus is primarily on real time site analytics, Clicky introduced Twitter follower count tracking on the dashboard and now it takes things further, with a section devoted to analyzing tweets.

How does it work?

The new feature uses the Twitter search API, and to to get things set up, you simply insert a search term of your choice. Search terms can be as simple as “@zee” if you just want to track a username or “tech near:Berlin within:20mi” if you want to track something a little more complex. This makes it quite easy to track competitors too.

What does it track?

As you can see below, the Twitter analytics dashboard is divided into seven sections; one tracking the number of tweets, the senders of those tweets, the recipients of those tweets, the types of those tweets, links mentioned, tags mentioned and finally a list of the most recent tweets for that search.

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Andrew Keen says that blogs are dead.
Matt Mullenweg says that blogging is only getting bigger.
Of course, they are both wrong.

The ways to promote yourself online are increasing every year. Once upon a time all we had was homepages with hard to remember urls at free hosting services which plastered our pages with bright and animated ads. We used the Blink tag, lots of animated gifs and some text. The most used sentence, no doubt, was “Under Construction”.

After that we evolved and started blogging. No more blinking eyecandy but nicely designed Themes with lots of useful widgets in the sidebar. And Google ads so we could earn some money. We wrote 2 posts a day in the first week, 1 posts a day in the second week then 1 post in the next month and then we simply stopped.

Now we have Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace pofiles, a personal and business blog, Delicious and StumbleUpOn tagged links collections and a Twitter and Flickr account.

I remember when I blogged a lot  on my personal blog I used to start with a simple idea (one that would probably fit in 140 characters) and sit down to write a blog post about it. I wrote an introduction, 3 examples and a conclusion. Then I added an illustration, some tags and a few hyperlinks and published. That generally took an hour.

Now I just tweet the simple idea I started out with and I’m done.

So, are blogs dead? No, of course not. Blogs are maturing and starting to follow basic economic principles where wealth (visitors, readers, audience) is unequally distributed. In the year 2000 the richest 1% of adults alone own 40% of global assets. That is how wealth is distributed in our world. When blogging started to hype the general idea was that everybody could make money from his or her blog and have an audience. Wealth (our readers) would be equally distributed.

In reality it turns out that most blogs have no more than 10 followers a month. In terms of audience these are the worlds poor. The bottom 50% of the world owns barely 1% of global wealth. Blogs are no exception to this unfortunate fact. We were hoping that the Lorenz Curve (the 80/20 rule) wouldn’t apply to blogging.

We now know it does.

On Twitter or Facebook these numbers work differently. If you have a Twitter accunt with 100 followers you might be perfectly happy with that. There is no need to make money on Twitter or get a huge following. A few interested listeners can make the whole experience worthwhile.

All of this leads to a huge shift from blogging to Twitter. Or to Microblogging in general. Matt Mullenweg told the audience at The Next Web Conference that in his experience blogging was actually growing. What he probably meant is that the top bloggers are receiving more visitors because Twitter and Facebook make sharing links easier.

I have no doubt however that a lot of people who would  have started a blog 2 years ago are now building their profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook or simply sticking to Twitter.

Anyone who says that blogging is dead has little or no sense of history. New technologies never ‘kill’ their predecessors. Television didn’t kill Radio and the Internet didn’t kill the Television. They all get a share of our attention and find their own audiences.

Blogs are dead?

No, The rumors of bloggings death have been greatly exaggerated…