microblogging

As expected, address and calendar organizer Plaxo unveiled on Monday its Pulse social-networking site.

Rumors about Plaxo expanding into social networking have been floating about recently; the company confirmed them to a number of press outlets last week and made some screenshots available in advance.

Now you can play with the beta service yourself. But don't call it a social-networking site; Pulse is really one part microblogging platform and one part RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader. And despite the fact that such a description sounds nauseatingly Web 2.0 pitchy, this is a service that Plaxo hopes will appeal … Read more

Frengo is a newish nanoblog service that makes it easy to both subscribe to topic areas and to create your own feeds. Compared to somewhat similar services (Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce), it has a few twists. For one, it's built for the 16-to-30 demographic and is thus a big SMS play. The Frengo founders also have good connections with the mobile carriers, and have managed to get carriers (notably Sprint subbrand Boost) onboard with the service.

As the carriers are raising their a la carte per-message rates on SMS in order to push people into all-you-can-eat bucket plans for … Read more

Featured on this week's Real Deal podcast: Twitter alternatives. Since our episode on Twitter back in May, a lot has changed in the world of nanoblogs. Twitter is not the only fruit. There's Jaiku and Pownce, both good competitors to Twitter. There's Facebook, which already has a "status" feature. And there are services like Profilactic and Twitterfeed for aggregating your status feeds (Jaiku is also a good aggregator). In just 15 minutes, Tom and I run through the options.

Here's the stream:

If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to … Read more

At a SuperNova mixer yesterday, I met with Jyri Engestrom, founder of the often-compared-to-Twitter nanoblogging service, Jaiku. He told me that the service has a new feature that just went into public beta: Channels. These are like standard personal Jaiku feeds, but shared by groups. Here's the Webware channel. As of this writing, it's pretty spare (being that I just set it up and nobody knew about it until this moment), but you can also check out the Buzz out Loud channel, which has a bit more going on.

Jaiku's group nanoblogs are very much like … Read more

Tumblr blogging service, which launched last month, gives people the chance to publish brief or full-length, media-rich posts using their browser or mobile phone. It's a happy medium between a tidbit posting service, such as Twitter, and a full-fledged blogging tool, such as WordPress or Blogger. Tumblr is aimed at folks who feel they may not have enough content or time to write a full blog, yet still want to write and share links and media.

Each Tumblr user gets their own "Tumblelog," a short-form blog that contains one of six types of media: word posts, photos, videos, quotes, URLs, and IM conversations. Each type of content has its own visual style and corresponding form for publishing. It's delightfully simple, and within minutes you can add a wide range of content. There's also a bookmarklet for your browser's toolbar to post items without having to navigate to Tumblr's home page.

Tumblr comes with some pretty advanced options for power users. You can give your Tumblelog its own domain, and even set the length for stories on your RSS feed. There are five themes to pick from, and you can customize the color of every aspect of the interface. If you are integrating Tumblr into your blog or Web site, there's an option to paste in your CSS.

What really sets Tumblr apart is its speed. It's blazingly fast. According to founder David Karp, the service gets in excess of 10,000 posts an hour, something you can visually track using an in-house tool called Radar. Currently in alpha, it shows the last 20 pieces of content published to the service. It's a little bit like Digg's DiggSpy, but without autorefreshing.

If you're on the fence about blogging or just want an easy way to publish interesting tidbits you find while browsing, give Tumblr a try. Our semiofficial Tumbleblog can be found here.

Note: From 2003 to 2007, Tumblr creator David Karp was a partner and CTO of UrbanBaby.com, now owned by CNET Networks, publisher of Webware.com.… Read more