This week we’ve seen both the release of a new version of Skype—Skype 4.0 Beta 1 for Windows initial release – Skype Garage—and a preview version of Twhirl that includes Seesmic playback—Seesmic Blog: Play Seesmic videos in Twhirl client—while they haven’t been connected previously, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Looking at the new Skype, it draws and centralizes your attention to the task at hand, communication with others.  Twhirl is doing the same for microblogging.  We’ve seen this before and when it’s happened great things have always followed.
When?
First the web browser.  Remember gopher and newsreaders and the other required …read more

I got into FriendFeed with most of the other bloggerati some time ago.  Frankly, though, I couldn’t get into it.  It was just another thing to have to pay attention to.  Even when Twhirl let me watch my FriendFeed stream and my Twitter stream, I still didn’t grok it.
In the last few days though, I started making a concerted effort to pay attention to my FriendFeed stream.  Realizing that there might be comments and questions about the things I wrote or shared, I wanted to make sure I tuned into that.
While doing that, I found that the people I was …read more

The information firehose is something that we all suffer from nowadays. I won’t even use the incremented number of Web x.0, that’s just foolish marketing, but we are beginning to try to tame the information beast by pulling more together. Is that the right course and will it save us?
If services won’t save us, will better applications?
Erick Schonfeld bemoans the state of information overload in his latest post on Techcrunch:
I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts …read more

The future is the information stream
Last week one of the big news items was Seesmic acquiring the Twitter client Twhirl.  This was bantered around a lot, but Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/WriteWeb really nailed it, I think.  Without hype or hyperbole Marshall saw what I saw as well–this is a glimpse of what we’ll be doing in the not-so-distant future online.
Like Marshall I hope that Twhirl might be able to make the move from the hamstrung Twitter API for updates to XMPP.  That would make Twhirl a power tool for information gathering.  Add video to this … maybe IM … maybe …read more