Lots o’ links saved up this week. Let’s see if I can adequately sort through them without boring you. No Vortex next week, as Chris and I are headed to London and Dublin for the next round of Innovate!Europe workshops. Pip pip.

News from the Social Media Vortex

-Twitter possibly raised another round of funding, on a rumored $250 million valuation. Here’s the question you should ask yourself: if Twitter started charging $20 a month to use it, would you pay it? If not, would you truly miss it? Be honest. Duncan Riley’s assessment is so apt, I may just make it the motto of this weekly review: “Until the very end, the citizens of Pompeii continued their decadent lives, until being buried for eternity.”

-Here’s a fun one. A conservative take on Wikipedia, called Conservapedia, has been taken down after Wonkette revealed a not-so-veiled hit list of Democratic senators on the site.

-The Boy Genius Report posted a spot-on list of things to hate about the iPhone. I would like to add the awful Google Voice Search to that list, which translated “Who directed A Fish Called Wanda” into “bass fish called wanda.” Not helpful.

-And I suppose we have to mention the kerfuffle of the week. Michael Arrington was spat upon in Munich and Jason Calacanis immediately responded with a call for an industry-wide group hug. I’ll simply posit that civility and manners in the technosphere should be an everyday fact of life, not a one-day occurrence when spittle is hurled.

Apps on the Radar

-Sarah Perez pointed me to RepairPal, an incredibly helpful iPhone app that uses GPS to deliver roadside assistance, auto repair estimates, and a repair shop directory.

-Hangman Cheat – if anyone can beat this thing, you are my linguistic hero.

-Not so much an app as a new feature, you can now submit news items to Techmeme via Twitter. Good idea in theory but I pity the soul who’ll have to wade through all the PR tips and self-promoting bloggers. (God knows I’ll be promoting myself shamelessly.)

DEMO trends – where the innovation lies with DEMO 09 applicants

-rich media publishing integrated with key back-office tools

-more location-aware mobile couponing – really getting a lot of traction this year

-highly personalized semantic networks

Tweet of the Week

-I swear I’m not kissing butt here. Chris Shipley’s tweet from the DLD Munich conference made me guffaw – and wish I was there: “At #DLD: ‘moving to an era of bio spare parts’ – Philippe Poullety. After visit to beer garden last night, I await the spare liver.”

Ephemera

-In the This Should Help You Sleep at Night department, a New Zealand man bought a used MP3 player filled with US military data, including personal details of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. The worst sentence: “He says he will hand it over to the US Defense Department should it ever ask.” Um, let’s go ahead and ask, shall we?

There is so much to share from this week that I’m literally giddy. In such a busy week, though, there have been no standout tweets. I may just nominate myself. We’ll see how I feel at the end of the post.

News from the Social Media Vortex

-Hutch Carpenter developed a handy chart to delineate the Angels and Demons of Social Media. I’m going to have to go with Rizzn who commented, “I mean no offense to Hutch, but…you’re either using it for business purposes or you’re using it to screw around and talk to people. If it’s the former, it doesn’t make you a demon and if it’s the latter, it doesn’t make you an angel. You’re still just a user.”

-I warned you about Scoble’s Army last week, didn’t I? Apparently he was listening, because it only took a couple of days to put that army to use. Seems he embedded an Amazon affiliate link in a tweet and the hue and cry from the technosphere was vociferous. I can’t say I fault him, actually. The man has 25,000 followers, for pete’s sake, and should find something to do with that colossal number. Either he sends them occasional ads or instructs them to revolt and become our masters. I’ll take the Kindle ad over Kang and Kodos any day.

-The Washington Post launched WhoRunsGov.com this week, a compendium of key players in D.C., including “members of the new administration, Pentagon officials… [and] senior congressional aides.” Or as my favorite Politico Mike Allen put it: “Translation: It’s Wikipedia for the Obama administration.”

Apps on the Radar

-Plinky – I’m either completely in love with this new content creation site or classify it as a key indicator of Web 2.0 frivolity. Perhaps both.  Louis Gray has an in-depth review of it. My two-cent summary: A cure for online writer’s block.

-For those with the opposite problem, check out TwitterEyes, a Firefox add-on that shortens your tweets to the prescribed 140 characters.

-And I confess to not having checked it out yet, but Pixelpipe is high on my list. Post one thing – video, text, or photo – to 60 different services. Perfect for those of us with more profiles than we can remember.

DEMO Trends – where the innovation is with DEMO 09 applicants

-A cleaner, more targeted take on mobile coupons

-A totally new way to look at and manage your email

-A new method of HD projection

Ephemera

-Little known fact about me: I love a good conspiracy theory. Yes, I’m one of those who thinks Oswald was a patsy. So imagine my glee when I read Duncan Riley’s post this morning on a UFO sighting during the Inauguration. Look! At the 11-second mark! A flying blur!

Tweet of the Week

-Since no one stepped up to the plate with my call for nominations (save for seedub with the helpful “yo mama”) I’m awarding this to myself. Well, really to Obama, for what I thought was the best line of his inaugural speech:

“All deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”

Five years from now, we’ll look back on this and laugh. Or at least some of us will. Others are decidedly more cranky these days. But the great FriendFeed-Socialthing war will seem trivial compared to… whatever meme we’re obsessing over in five years. The funniest part of all this hubbub is that the CEOs of both companies don’t even view each other as competitors. After talking with both Matt Galligan at Socialthing and Bret Taylor from FriendFeed, it’s clear that the two companies are approaching a very real problem – information overload – in very different ways. In fact, it’s entirely possible for someone to use both services at the same time, with virtually no rips in the space-time continuum.

As Taylor noted, the end goals of the two companies are their key difference. FriendFeed is about content discovery and applying social solutions to the problem of information overload. Socialthing focuses more broadly on a user’s entire digital life, in an attempt to make sense of the myriad networks out there. FriendFeed is bringing the conversation in, while Socialthing is broadcasting it out. FriendFeed has morphed into a separate social network while Socialthing wants to help consolidate all the networks you’ve already built. FriendFeed, tomato; Socialthing, tomahto.

What was so striking to me today, after talking with them virtually back-to-back, was the similarity of messaging. It’s almost like they met in a backroom over the weekend to get their stories straight. The two companies dovetail quite nicely and, if the right conversations happened, I could see FriendFeed plugging its stream into Socialthing. That isn’t to suggest that FriendFeed is somehow lesser. But whether they intended it or not, FriendFeed has become a go-to social network. It’s one of the most vibrant and consuming networks I’ve ever been on. Perhaps that’s because it isn’t crowded with super-pokes and relationship quizzes. It’s stunningly simple, an aspect some aren’t fond of. But Taylor recognizes the power in this simplicity. While FriendFeed does intend to build out the product per user feedback, they’re also mindful of staying true to a basic app that has charmed a legion of tech-weary testers.

Socialthing, on the other hand, doesn’t yet have its fanbase, so is lacking in the fervent free press that has accompanied FriendFeed. Just officially launched last week at SXSW, the service boasts a slick iPhone app and a UI with a bit more polish on it. I also really like that you don’t have to import your social graph; it finds it for you. (But doesn’t take it quite as far as spammy Spokeo.) Socialthing is working to solve a problem that has become urgent for many in the last couple of years – disparate social networks scattered hither and yon – and they’ve taken only the first baby steps. It’s a company worth keeping a close eye on, as they’ve come closer to cracking the code than any company I’ve seen to date.

As for FriendFeed, we need to start classifying them in a different category. FriendFeed isn’t interested in managing your digital life; they’re interested in taming the content flow by showing users what their trusted friends are reading and recommending. The ad-hoc social network that has sprung up is an interesting exercise in the social graph. But it all comes back to the content. After talking with Taylor, I’d instead match the company against another competitor – Persai. Finding relevant, interesting and unique content among the millions of pages hitting the Web each day is an equally important problem to solve. So if we have to start wars, we should find new competitors for FriendFeed and Socialthing. They’re two innovative companies tackling two separate but equal technological problems.

The blog world is atwitter (pun intended) today over FriendFeed. TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley had the nerve to say, “I don’t get it” and the chorus of boos was swift. Louis Gray, an early adopter and rabid proponent of FriendFeed, said Riley missed the point by only giving the service the most cursory of glances.

I’ve written before of my love of FriendFeed and still stand by that. But I think the company and its faithful fan base should absorb opinions like Duncan’s rather than discard them as those of the lazy and/or uninformed. What got me thinking on this was a similar situation with Twine earlier in the week . A negative review of Twine by Marshall Kirkpatrick received all manner of response, both in the Twine app and in the comments to his post, one of which was mine. Marshall made some excellent points about the nascence of the app and how much needed to be improved upon, just as Duncan brought up very real issues with FriendFeed. What interests me is not the specific criticisms but the manner in which they were received. Fervent fans reacted quickly, in essence saying “how dare you” and “you just don’t get it” to the critics. The problem with such reactions is that they bypass the usability issues and tech hurdles that need to be addressed. Radar Networks’ Senior Architect Peter Royal had a smart reaction to Marshall:

He describes a user’s experience if they show up in twine with no hand-holding. it clearly illustrates things we need to focus on from a user point-of-view.

The word “beta” has lost much of its meaning in Web 2.0, but at its essence is user criticism and vitally necessary feedback. Resounding praise isn’t of much use to emerging technology. It’s nice to hear, of course, and validation confirms that the developers are on the right track. But companies should start responding to “I don’t get it” with “What are we doing wrong?” The ensuing conversations will likely be far more productive for both sides.