Here’s the crux: If you’re a Twitter addict who loves the fast-paced discussions and news sharing that can go on there, chances are you’ll love the social side of FriendFeed.

Now – you might well be tutting right now. You might have tried FriendFeed in the past, set up an account and then never really looked at it again. Maybe you think of FriendFeed as a place that puts all your output from around the web; blogs, photos, videos, tweets etc, in one place. Well yes, it is but it’s so much more than that!

With its latest redesign, taken out of beta yesterday, FriendFeed is now a realtime discussion engine beyond compare. Twitter addicts are used to posting a Tinyurl link to something interesting and then getting a disjointed conversation with their followers. It’s not very efficient and it can be hard to keep track of the discussion.

With FriendFeed you can get conversations started based on anything – items you’ve imported automatically via RSS feeds or posts (complete with links and pictures if you like) that you’ve made directly to FriendFeed. Comments are then listed below each item making it easy to discuss anything and keep track of what people are saying.

The best bit is it’s all in real time! As soon as someone posts something it appears at the top of your feed. It can seem a bit too much if you’re subscribed to a lot of people’s feeds – items can pop up one after the other like a waterfall of information at times, but there’s a ‘Pause’ button you can hit at any time to relax and take stock.

Twitter addicts regularly complain about the lack of easy ways to separate your friends into different groups. With FriendFeed that’s easy.

Twitter addicts complain about keeping track of search terms being more difficult than it should be. With FriendFeed you can save searches for keywords across a wide range of Social Media services with ease. Want to know what’s hot in your area of interest? You can set up searches as simple or as complicated as you like and get an instant view of what’s going on.

FriendFeed handles media better than Twitter too. Twitpics are displayed inline, as are video and audio links – in many cases you can play them without leaving the current page.

As you can tell – I love FriendFeed. It’s not perfect – kinks in the new realtime interface are still being ironed out but as a discussion platform I much prefer it to Twitter. The main problem with it is you’re not there! I currently interact with hardcore FriendFeed users and it’s enjoyable enough but I miss the community of Twitterers that I regularly talk to.  Our discussions would be so much richer, and enriching, with FriendFeed.

So, you’ve heard my pitch. What do you think? Sign up and give it a go. Give it a week or two of interacting with the service before you pass a judgement.

My profile is here – subscribe to me and some other users you find interesting and let’s see if we can help the service gain some more traction. It’s well worth the effort!

The Holy Grail? Good quality audio recording on a smartphone.

Mobile phones have come a long way in the past five years. From the basic communications devices of yore, they have evolved into what Nokia calls “Multimedia Computers” capable of web access, good quality photos, live video broadcasting and much, much, more. There is, however, a chink in the smartphone’s armour. Something that seems to be overlooked but is really holding some users back – sound recording quality.

You don’t need a great quality microphone if you’re making a phone call. Once your voice has been digitally compressed and shoved across a mobile network or two all that really matters is that the person on the other end can understand it. However, when you’re recording a video or using your phone as an audio recorder (both things many phones can do with ease these days) that cheap mic starts to look like a false economy.

Let’s take a look at a few examples of the problem.

• This weekend All About Symbian published their thoughts about their first look at one of the the biggest mobile phone launches of the year, the Samsung Omnia HD. The short version? It’s an impressive handset which can record HD-quality video, let down by… poor quality audio recording.

• Last night on Twitter, Julian Tait mentioned that a group conversation he had recorded in his Nokia N95 was let down by… poor quality audio recording. The sound dropped out when people far from the mic talked thanks to the way the Automatic Gain Control works.

• Blogger James Whatley recorded a solo podcast last week using nothing but his N95. I downloaded it as Whatley always has something interesting to say. It was certainly a worthwhile listen but it was difficult to listen to because it was let down by… poor quality audio recording.

The problem is that manufacturers aren’t putting enough emphasis on microphone quality. Why should they? Not a lot of people prioritise audio recording. The thing is, as the video quality increases (how long before the first full-HD 1080p phone comes along?) the shoddy sound is going to become even more apparent.

That said, there’s only so much that can be done with the internal mic on a phone. It has to be small so the quality’s not going to amazing. Why not allow external mics then? There’s nothing to stop an external mic being developed for more phones. In fact, Nokia created one for Reuters journalists to use with their standard-issue N95s. Although this isn’t commercially available you can build a mic kit for the N95 following this guide from Shelbinator.com.

It shouldn’t be that hard though. If a smartphone really is a ‘Multimedia Computer’ surely it shouldn’t be difficult to connect a mic and get to grips with some serious recording? Come on manufacturers, step up your game!

[Image credit: Steve Garfield on Flickr]

After that it was on to the ‘Unconference’ sessions. I did a presentation about ‘Creating and Sharing with a Mobile Phone’. I was a little worried that it would be a bit too much like preaching to the converted but the people there, including journalists and academics, seemed to enjoy my introduction to services like Shozu, Qik and Google Latitude. We also got on to talking about the ethics of mobile video broadcasting – something I’ve discussed here before.

I created my presentation with Google Docs and you can view the whole thing here. Feel free to post comments and questions below.

Also, Sarah Hartley from the Manchester Evening News streamed bits of my presentation using Qik, including this bit – about Qik, funnily enough.

What will the BBC use their Twitter account for?

Last month I uncovered how the Twitter username ‘BBC’ was fooling people into believe it was an official BBC News feed when in actual fact it was being run by a third party. This wasn’t really a problem until they insulted someone who believed they were contacting the BBC via the account. You can read the full story of what happened and how the BBC gained control of the account here.

Now the BBC is trying to decide what to do with the account. My suggestion? Rather than just have it as a news feed they should use it as a form of interactive online presence that can speak for the whole corporation. As many Twitter users will attest, lots of brands have active Twitter presences that contact users who make their problems known. When they do it right brands who are active on Twitter can improve their word-of-mouth reputation through being able to troubleshoot customers’ problems before they escalate.

The problem the BBC would have with this is that unlike most other brands, practically everyone in the UK is their customer. Whether it’s TV, radio or the internet everyone has some kind of contact with the BBC’s output. There’s no way one person sat at a computer running a Twitter account all day could properly answer every single problem with, or comment about, the BBC. That said, having someone operating an active online voice for the BBC would be massively beneficial to the corporation.

The BBC has had its fair share of controversy in recent months. It takes time for the official BBC response to a big story to be communicated via traditional news channels. The real-time chatter and instant news available on services such as Twitter has led people to begin to expect prompt official statements. I noted a distinct frustration amongst Twitter users over the amount of time it took for official news to be announced after the plane crash in Amsterdam this morning, for example. The ‘BBC’ account on Twitter could be the official presence that people look to when the BBC becomes involved in a big story.

Will they use it that way? Only time will tell but to use it as nothing more than a news service would be a real shame.

Converting people to Twitter can be a slow process as unlike Facebook there’s no immediate return on your investment. You can’t look at friends’ drunken photos, play Scrabble against them or throw a sheep at them; it’s just 140-character bursts of text. Some people will never see the appeal, but it’s always good when you manage to change someone’s perspective on Twitter.

Ewan MacLeod, editor of Mobile Industry Review, posted an acerbic rant about Twitter last week, stating that there was far too much irrelevant nonsense being tweeted and that the amount of ‘noise’ put him off using the service. He then asked me, as a heavy user of Twitter, to write up my thoughts about the  service and to point out what he  might have missed  about it. I was happy to oblige and on Saturday morning I sat down to write about 500 words or so in support of my beloved microblogging service.

Somehow I ended up writing double that but I think I covered a lot of what makes Twitter so great. You can read the full article over on Mobile Industry Review: 13 months on Twitter – A MIR reader’s response to my request for help. It seems I changed his perspective. One more Twitter-skeptic down!

Can anyone think of any benefits of Twitter that I’ve missed?

Twaffik is an automated system that works via a Twitter profile. You follow Twaffik and it will automatically follow you back. Then, whenever you’re out and about and spot trouble on the region’s roads or public transport network you can send Twaffik a Direct Message via Twitter. The service then tweets out your traffic news to all the service’s followers.

Put together by Paul Carruthers and Alan Holding, it’s a great idea. From what I can tell there’s some clever email parsing (of text from Twitter notification emails) and automation scripting going on here. Although it’s currently only intended to be used in Manchester it could easily be rolled out to other areas.

The danger with Twaffik is that it becomes an easy way for spammers to reach a large audience. They only need to send one DM to spam lots of people. That should be kept to a minimum as there will be some stringent moderating of users going on and Terms of Service prohibit misusing the service.

Taking the soft launch route, Twaffik only has 14 users at present and there are only a couple of traffic news updates sent per day. However, if the service takes off they could face a problem of too much content. If all Manchester’s Twitterers began using it on a daily basis they’d quickly stop again as their Twitter feeds would be filled with traffic news and it would be hard to find updates from their friends amongst tales of motorway pileups and late buses.

So, there’s a scalability problem here. There are a couple of ways they can get round it. The first is to pray that Twitter launch a huge overhaul to the basic platform. Twitter client Tweetdeck is famed for its ability to group the people you follow in whatever way you see fit. If Twitter supported grouping at platform level everyone, not only Tweetdeck users, could create groups. They could maybe have a ‘Music people’ group, a ‘Web 2.0 Gasbags’ group (Hi!) and a ‘Traffic News’ group. That way Twaffik updates wouldn’t interfere with the rest of the Twitter experience.

Will that happen? Who knows; in the meantime, how about mirroring the Twaffik service on a custom platform – maybe a Laconi.ca install? They could still serve information to Twitter but if Twaffik was running on its own server it could stay up even when Twitter’s down and there’d be all sorts of interesting ways they could develop as they’d be running the service on their own terms, not Twitter’s.

That’s all for the future though. For now it’s just good to see that Paul and Alan are trying something new, interesting and socially useful with Twaffik. You can watch a video of them explaining the service over at The Mancunian Way.

One of the latest Twitter services to launch is Mr Tweet. The service is based around the idea of filling the ‘holes’ in the list of people you follow. No matter how hard you’ve worked at building up a list of people who interest you there are probably a few people that you’ve missed. By comparing the people you follow with the people that they follow, it displays a list of people you’ll probably want to follow.

Mr Tweet is simple to use.  You simply follow the service’s Twitter account, they follow you back and then you sit back and wait.  After the service has analysed  the list of people you follow it builds up its list of suggestions and sends you a Direct Message containing a link to a web page containing your results.

So, how does it fare? Well, the first few pages of my results feature many of the ‘usual suspects’ – Pete Cashmore, Loic Le Meur – people who are massively popular but that I choose not to follow for whatever reason (not that I have anything against them). Much more interesting were the people further down; people who aren’t hugely popular ‘Twitter-stars’ but who I might actually benefit from following and who might actually be interested in what I have to say.

So, Mr Tweet definitely has worth but even it’s developers admit that it’s not perfect yet.  My only concern at the moment the is feature on their site that allows you to follow people directly from their page.  In order for this to work it needs your Twitter login password.  You may remember the controversy a couple of weeks ago, when TwitterRank became popular.  It too was asking for login details in order to give you a ‘rank’ based on your popularity on Twitter.

People warned that TwitterRank may simply be a scam to harvest Twitter IDs but it turned out not to be the case. Could Mr Tweet be similar? I had initial concerns that maybe it was but today I’m more inclined to believe it’s a genuinely good-hearted service.  Why the change of mind?  For a start, in the last 24 hours they seem to have got rid of an automatic tweet from your account when you followed someone via the service (it appears to have gone, anyway).  The site now simply encourages people to spread the word about the service.  It shows they’re willing to listen to suggestions on improvements.

I’d still be inclined to follow new people the Mr Tweet introduces you to via the Twitter site instead of via Mr Tweet itself.  After all, the fewer people you give your login details to the more secure you’ll be.

At the time of writing, the service is down (apparently after Robert Scoble crashed it by running his enormous Twitter follows list through it).  When it comes back, why not give it a go?  You might find some interesting people you’ve never heard of.  Let’s face it – that’s what Twitter’s all about – interesting people.

That’s all well and good but all that noise comes from somewhere.  Why not kill it off at the source?  Sure, some of the “noise” that people complain about is perfectly useful stuff for someone, it’s just that one person’s news is another’s noise.  The real problem is the stuff that’s pretty much useless to everyone.  Social Media content that’s created for no reason other than because it can.

One example of this comes from FriendFeed.  They recently launched the ability to stream every single thing you do on their site to your Twitter account.  I very quickly had to unfollow a couple of people of Twitter who decided to stream every FriendFeed comment, ‘like’ and shared item onto Twitter.  It was noise that was useless to everyone.  If someone wanted to know about all this stuff they’d follow the user on FriendFeed too.  All these FriendFeed items on Twitter simply clogged up my feed, making it difficult for me to see ‘genuine’ tweets.

Another example of pointlessly created noise comes from one of my pet-hate Social Media apps; BriteKite.  The idea of BriteKite is location-based social networking.  Don’t get me wrong – location-based apps are very exciting and given time and mainstream acceptance they’ll be very useful.

For now though, the main way people seem to be using BriteKite is to ‘check in’ at locations.  This simply means telling the service where you are.  BriteKite can then let your Twitter followers know where you are by posting a Tweet saying “I’m at Wormwood Scrubs” or whatever.  The tweet is accompanied by a full address for the location.  Now, this has its uses but I think that sometimes people “check in” just for something to do.  Do I care that someone is at Rochdale Station or on 5th Avenue?  No, and neither do at least 99% of their followers.  It’s just irrelevant noise.

I’ve probably been guilty of creating some pointless noise myself but I’m certainly careful these days to ask myself “Do I really need to broadcast this?” before I sign up to a new Social Media service.  So, maybe its time to ask yourself “Am I noisier than I think?”

Choo Choo - doing it right

Back in 2005 Myspace became the most important tool for bands to get themselves noticed online.  The huge mainstream uptake of the service meant there was a ready audience of potential fans for eager unsigned acts to tap into.

The good times didn’t last though.  It didn’t take long for fatigue to set in amongst Myspace’s non-musical userbase.  Constant friend requests from (mostly awful) bands meant that many people who weren’t big music fans abandoned Myspace entirely.

Facebook arrived just at the right time to suck up those disaffected people.  Myspace was left largely as a network of musicians and other creative people ‘befriending’ each other but not building strong active fanbases.  Myspace remains a well-used social network but certainly in the UK I don’t know many people who have checked their Myspace profile in the past year.  While it remains a useful act-finding resource for the music industry’s A&R departments, bands are having to look elsewhere to engage with existing fans and court new ones.

Facebook offers opportunities for bands to promote themselves.  Anyone can set up a band’s presence using a Facebook Group or the more advanced Pages service.  The difference with Facebook is that general users aren’t so keen to engage with people they don’t know in real life.  In fact, Facebook actively discourage interaction with people you don’t know offline.  That makes fanbase building difficult as only people who are already aware of a band are likely to find their Facebook presence.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways for bands to build a following online.  The growing popularity of Twitter this year means there’s an ever-increasing audience of people who will happily ‘Follow’ anyone who posts interesting content using the service.  So, how should a band use Twitter to promote themselves?  Let’s take a look at some examples…

Doing it wrong: The Hussys

Scottish band The Hussys started following me on Twitter a few months ago but I declined to follow them back because of the way they tweet.  They repeatedly post the same information over and over. Gig dates and links to their website are continually reposted every couple of weeks with very little other interaction with the service.  If they personalised their approach they’d become a lot more appealing.

Twitter is great for having conversations with fans and talking about what a band is getting up to.  The great thing about the service is that it’s both intimate in tone and public in nature.  How great would it be for your favourite band to post updates about how rehearsals are going, what beer’s on the rider for tonight’s gig or teasers about new song titles?

Doing it wrong: Me

Yes, I have to confess that I certainly don’t promote my music well on Twitter.  While I set up my account in order to promote the music I make as The Star Fighter Pilot, I quickly got sucked into the world of Twitter.  While I still tweeted about my music it ceased to be my main focus.  I’m not bothered at all – I’ve got a lot out of using Twitter including, ironically, a song.  However, if you’re joining Twitter to promote your music make sure you keep that in mind when you start tweeting about annoying people on your bus ride to work.

Doing it right but not enough: Stone Walters

Unlike The Hussys above, British soul artist Stone Walters certainly gives insights into his life through Twitter.  “Recovering from the Stevie Wonder show I went to yesterday” he says in one tweet, “Explaining to my son that he can’t do somersaults today as the 15 stitches he had in his face from falling over yesterday need to heal first” he says in another.  The problem is that there’s often two-week gaps between tweets!

If you’re going to have a presence on Twitter make sure you update at least once a day wherever possible. It shows that you’re interested in sharing with your followers and will make sure that you stay in their consciousness every day. If they feel like they know you they’re likely to want to spend money on your music.

Doing it right: Choo Choo

Swiss act Choo Choo (not to be confused with similarly-pronounced Californians, Xiu Xiu) use Twitter very effectively.  They don’t spam their followers with gig listings, they converse with them using @username replies, they give insights into what the band are doing and talk about other bands that they like.  Earlier today they were using it to crowdsource some help in securing gigs in the UK.  By using Twitter in the same way a ‘normal user’ does but by keeping focused on the band, Choo Choo are providing value for, and interaction with, their fans.

So are we close to newspapers proclaiming someone to be “the first band discovered through Twitter”?  It’s not likely – you’ll always need good tunes, a strong image and heaps of dedication to achieve musical success.  That said, Twitter is a great, cost-effective way of giving fans something extra.  If your band has a social networking fiend in its midst why not get them to set up and run a Twitter account today?

The key points again:

• Offer insights into life in the band.  Something extra beyond the music.
• Reply to fans’ messages using @username replies.  It shows you value their input.
• Post regularly.  People may ‘un-follow’ you if you don’t post for a while.  Being active attracts more followers.
• Don’t spam fans with gig listings and links to your web shop.  People can find those things via the link on your profile page, or a simple Google search.

“Dear Twitter musicians. For my birthday, can somebody write me a bleepy electronic song about robotic pigs driving flying cars?”

Quite why she wanted that particular subject matter I have no idea.  However, always up for a challenge (there’s nothing like a specific brief to concentrate the mind) I decided to take her up on the task.  Well, I missed her birthday by two days, but on Thursday night I turned in my finished MP3.

On Saturday morning it went up on the blog that Justhipper co-runs, The Indie Credential, for free download. The question is, is it the first song ever commissioned via Twitter?  There have certainly been songs written about Twitter (this one for example) but maybe, just maybe, we made a little bit of social media history last week.

If you know different feel free to correct me by leaving a comment below.