Fuser in the News

Lots of sites let you keep track of your friends. The problem now is keeping track of all the ways to keep track.

For many people, the explosion of online media has been a mixed blessing. Thanks to email and instant messaging, blogs, video and photo sites, social-networking sites and the like, it's now much easier to stay connected to what's happening in the world and among friends. But it can be a nightmare to keep track of it all.

So-called RSS feeds offer a partial solution. This technology allows a user to create a Web page that automatically receives updates from chosen blogs, news sites and other Web pages, so the user doesn't have to keep checking each of those sites individually to see what's new. But that doesn't solve the problem of keeping up with everything friends are posting and viewing on the Web, and it doesn't help people manage multiple email accounts and other forms of online communication.

Now, a handful of start-ups have created sites that let people track their friends' latest posts on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, photo-sharing services like Flickr, instant-messaging services like Twitter, video portals like YouTube and news-sharing sites like Digg, among other places, without having to visit multiple sites. A single screen alerts the user to everything friends are doing on all those sites and provides links to the new content. It's a concept that some in the industry have dubbed social aggregation.

"The main activity is just for people to share interesting things with their friends and figure out what their friends are sharing," says Paul Buchheit, co-founder of FriendFeed Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., start-up whose service allows users to keep track of what friends are up to online.

Other start-up services let people keep track of friends in a different way, by letting users check all their email accounts and all their communication on social-networking sites in one place.

Saving Time

The new tracking services have attracted small numbers of users so far. A spokeswoman at comScore Inc., which tracks the number of visitors to Web sites, says these sites all have too few visitors or were created too recently to be followed by comScore.

But they are taking steps to broaden their appeal, like redesigning their sites to make them easier to use and improving their privacy protection. For instance, Spokeo Inc., a Mountain View start-up that allows users to track their friends' activity on various sites, has changed its site to more quickly reflect people's privacy settings on other sites. If someone changes his MySpace profile from "public" to "private," for example, Spokeo now withdraws access to that profile from its site within a day, whereas in the past it sometimes took longer.

The new sites also have some limitations. Some don't track all the sites a user might typically visit to interact with friends. Others require that users sign up to allow their content to be shared with friends, rendering them useless if, say, only one person in a group of friends chooses to use the service. Still others require users who want to share what they are doing online to register their log-in details from each outside site, raising privacy concerns.

Still, they begin to solve a problem for some people. Nicholas Carrasco, a 29-year-old software programmer in Arlington, Va., uses FriendFeed to keep his friends up to date on everything he's done lately online, like uploading a photo to Flickr, writing a blog post on Google's Blogger site or sending a message on Twitter. He doesn't have to do this manually; FriendFeed tracks his activity automatically and his friends can see his "feed" by using FriendFeed or by looking at a special area of his page on Facebook. Previously, these friends would have had to separately visit Flickr, Blogger and Twitter to see Mr. Carrasco's updates on those sites.

Mr. Carrasco tracks some of his friends' online activity with FriendFeed, but he also uses a tracking service from Socialthing Inc. of Boulder, Colo., that he finds easier to use for monitoring other people's activity, because it asks for his own user name and password on various social sites, then automatically detects his friends on those sites and lets him follow them via Socialthing even if they aren't Socialthing users. FriendFeed, on the other hand, allows him only to follow other FriendFeed users or add nonusers manually by entering those friends' user names for various social sites.

Mr. Carrasco says being able to keep up with his friends on just a couple of sites is a big time saver. "I work nonstop, so the faster and more efficiently I can do something, the better," he says.

Mail Call

Similar features are being adopted by more-established sites with much bigger numbers of users. Facebook Inc. and Plaxo Inc. are both making it easier for users of their networking sites to track their friends' activities on other sites. Facebook, for instance, has long included features called the "news feed" and "mini feed" that notify friends of one another's latest activities on their profile pages, like the posting of new photos or personal details. In April, Facebook introduced a feature that displays friends' latest posts on certain other sites, such as photos on Flickr or favorite articles on Digg, within the news feeds and mini feeds.

That appeals to Mike Lewis, a 30-year-old entrepreneur in Washington, D.C., who keeps in touch with more than 450 friends on Facebook. Mr. Lewis recently chose to display updates from his Flickr, Digg and Del.icio.us accounts on Facebook. "I thought it was cool," Mr. Lewis says. "It's a good way to share." A recent visit to his Facebook page showed, in his mini feed, photos from Flickr showing a recent college reunion and links to some articles on Digg about the presidential race.

Lezley Faleafine, a 37-year-old in Honolulu, uses one of the new services that help people manage multiple email accounts and other online communications. Ms. Faleafine uses a service called Fuser, from Boulder-based Confluence Commons Inc., to gather all her Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail emails, as well as her MySpace and Facebook messages, in one place, the Fuser.com site.

"It really relieves the stress of having to log into every single account," Ms. Faleafine says. "Fuser just simplifies everything by putting everything on one page."

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