Social Media Roundup: Toluu, FriendFeed, and Twhirl Updates

Services are updating like crazy this week! The new updates should keep fans and users excited for the rest of the week and also help with user productivity. Here’s a look at the recent changes from some of my favorite services.

Toluu Adds More Tabs

toluu2  Toluu, my favorite social RSS discovery service, has rolled out a very complimentary update to the service. Previously, Toluu revamped the activities page by adding more tabbed views. They also integrated Twitter into the service. Now, when I add a feed, it’s also “tweeted” on Twitter.

Today the service has added the tab interface to the Feed pages. Head to the SheGeeks feed page on Toluu and you’ll see a tabs for the most recent posts, popular posts, and Toluu subscribers.

toluu feed view

According to the Toluu blog,

Also in this release we have added the greatly requested date stamps, improved YouTube embed compatibility, improved the loading time of the contacts page by roughly 5x, and fixed some bugs surrounding the invitation page.

For more information on Toluu check out TheSocialGeeks podcast. If you’d like to join Toluu, I have 115 Toluu invites. Just leave a comment below to snag one.

More Discussions:
Toluu Adds More Features, Helps You Decide How to Subscribe
Toluu Just Got Better: New Feed Page Views and More!
Subscribe or Not? Toluu Just Got Better at Helping You Decide

              

FriendFeed Adds More Services

  FriendFeed, a social aggregator and lifestreaming service, has also added more features and fixes. In the past week the FriendFeed has added rooms (or groups) and and personalized recommendations. Now the service has added 5 more services to include in your lifestream: Intense Debate, Brightkite, Diigo, Mister Wong, and Tipjoy.

friendfeed services

Other updates include a FriendFeed feed revamp, highlighted comments of those that you subscribe to, along with a host of other fixes and minor updates.
      

Twhirl Ands More Support & Functionality

twhirl logo The latest update of Twhirl features a host of features that will help out a ton when Twitter starts going wonkers on you without warning. For Twitter, Twhirl has introduced auto throttling. This feature allows Twhirl to automagically reduce your API requests per hour so that you get less timeout errors.

twhirl api usageYou can also hide messages from previous sessions when you start a new one, search via Summize, XMPP support, a new color theme (Orange Gray), Twhirl status message updates, and more.
         

On the FriendFeed side of things there have been more drastic improvements. I haven’t used Twhirl for FriendFeed since it’s second update. I decided to give it a try this time around and can agree that it’s much more stable. For one, the trash icon actually works. When I click it, the entire screen goes blank. +1 for Twhirl! Other updates include inline commenting, user information, a button to see more comments inline, support for FriendFeed rooms, and better stability for not killing your comment text when an update rolls in and you just so happen to be in the middle of writing a comment.

twhirl and friendfeed

More Discussions:

Twhirl Catches a Much-Needed Performance Update
Twhirl Gets a Fresh Coat of Paint

      

Roundup Completed

So there’s your roundup of the latest service updates. If you’re using any of these services are you enjoying the updates so far?

For me, the Toluu update is impressive and as a subscriber stat addict, I like knowing how many people are subscribing to my feed in Toluu. The new views also provide ways for me to know what articles are popular and find more feeds to subscribe to.

With FriendFeed, I can finally add my Diigo bookmarks to the service, though I was hoping Toluu would be in there too. I also like the highlighted comments from those that I subscribe to. It’s great for pointing out others that may be of interest to me.

With Twhirl, what’s not to like about this update. It’s way more stable and actually makes using Twitter a lot easier, especially when Twitter is taking on too much. The most productive feature of the update has to be the Twitter API usage icon. If you hover your mouse over this icon you can see how many requests are currently allowed and how many requests you’ve used up so far. It’s great for keeping track of when you’re coming close to going over your limit.

twhirl usage icon

Corvida Raven

A natural pioneer at grasping the rapidly changing landscape of technology, Corvida Raven talks tech in plain English on SheGeeks.net.