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Nvidia’s goal is to pack as much processing punch as possible into a few-hundred-milliwatt power envelope, said Michael Rayfield, general manager of the Mobile Business Unit. “I said start from zero. And then made my team beg and plead for every milliwatt,” he said. Notebook PC processors typically operate in power envelopes between 10 and 35 watts.

These tiny devices are designed to run 720p HDTV video for 10 hours–one of the marquee features that Nvidia will be emphasizing, Rayfield said. He plugged a prototype APX 2500-based device into a large screen TV via a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connector and played high-definition movies with the same fluidity and resolution as you get from a big HDTV box or bigger computer.

All on, believe it or not, Windows Mobile. The operating system has struggled since its inception back in 2000. Initially, it had promise on Compaq (and later Hewlett-Packard) iPaq handhelds, but these devices never appealed to a large base, even in corporate America which eventually went en masse for the Blackberry. There is more acceptance now as Windows Mobile 6.1 is adopted by companies like HTC, Samsung, and Acer (which announced its intention to bring out a Windows smartphone)–but it is still Windows. In a post-iPhone world, Nvidia says this is not adequate.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

But to the user, the biggest difference will be Microsoft’s Mobile Windows interface and what can happen when there is Nvidia GeForce graphics silicon pushing everything around.

Watch out, Nvidia is stalking the
iPhone. The maker of fast graphics processors will apply its chip know-how to juice up the mobile internet device market and the Windows Mobile interface.

As reported back in February, after a decade of pumping up PC performance, Nvidia is betting a big part of its future on boosting graphics performance in fit-in-your-pocket mobile internet devices (MIDs).

The prototype mobile internet device that Nvidia is currently working on is not the product that will appear from phone companies or navigation device vendors. Rayfield said it is necessarily a thick device and contains extra circuit boards because it is a development platform. The final product made by device manufacturers will be thin, he said.

Nvidia APX 2500 block diagram

Nvidia APX 2500-based Windows Mobile device has flick-and-roll interface

The APX 2500 is different from Intel’s Atom processor platform–which is offered as a processor and a separate chipset–because the 2500 integrates everything onto one piece of silicon. This makes it more akin to Intel’s upcoming Moorestown processor that’s due next year or early 2010.

CNET Video of APX 2500 prototype here.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

The platform that Nvidia is demonstrating goes far beyond the staid, pin-striped Windows Mobile that is used today. Nvidia is showing finger-flick-and-roll screens and accelerometer-based reorienting 720p video.

iPhone-style devices with Nvdia’s APX 2500 system-on-a-chip–due late this year and next year–incorporate most of the functionality of a PC. (See block diagram.) And it is important to note that Nvidia is building all of the core electronics that will run a mobile internet device, not just the graphics component.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

Nvidia APX 2500-based Windows Mobile device interface

But what’s more interesting is that 18 percent say they plan to spend more, despite widespread concerns over an unstable economy. More specifically, respondents in that group say they see themselves buying gadgets more than content.

“These are the people who tend to be in a higher economic situation so the cost of technology may not be such a barrier for them, whether it’s a Blu-ray player or a gaming console or a new
iPod,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. “Those are the things they seem to be anticipating purchasing…That’s not to say they’re not going to buy movies or music, but their expectation is if they’re spending more, they’re spending on devices and consumer electronics.”

In 2001, there was a new
PlayStation game console, and DVD and CD sales were still on the upswing.

Compelling gadgets are the key to consumers’ hearts–and wallets–during a recession, according to a consumer spending study.

“What you’re looking at now that’s different, especially in music is CD sales have been down pretty significantly. DVD is starting to look like a mature product category,” said Crupnick. “The willingness of people in bad times to collect things is less than it was five, six, seven years ago.”

In the recession in 2001, spending on entertainment devices and content remained relatively steady, but this time around, as the price of gas and food continues to climb, the landscape of the consumer electronics industry is very different.

Of those surveyed, 37 percent of U.S. consumers say they plan to cut back when it comes to entertainment purchases this year, according to an upcoming report from The NPD Group, “Entertainment Trends in America.” Just under half of the 11,000 interviewed for the study said they’ll likely spend the same amount this year as in 2007.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The technology industry must abandon proprietary agendas and self-centered objectives and work together to collaborate on encryption and key management standards. My hope is that the Intel/Oracle announcement adheres to this philosophy. My fear is that it does not.

So in essence, this announcement is about Intel technologies still in development, a variety of complex Oracle stuff, and the overhyped industry concept of cloud computing. Oh, and I forgot to add that the two companies mix encryption into this nebulous morass.

On the Intel side, the company is highlighting its Virtual Technology (VT) platform that supports “hardware-rooted” security, something Intel calls its “Trusted Computing for Execution Platform.” For Oracle, it’s all about its grid computing technologies including databases, application clusters, and virtual machines.

Oracle is famous for using its Oracle World conference to announce everything but the digital kitchen sink. Earlier this week, Oracle announced a database appliance with CEO Larry Ellison crowing, “Oracle is now in the hardware business!” As if this wasn’t weird enough, Oracle also teamed up with Intel to make a vague announcement about encryption for cloud computing and virtualization.

I’m really not sure what to make of this announcement, so I’ll respond by describing what I do know. We already have well-established ways to use encryption for authentication (i.e., Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI) and for protecting the confidentiality of data in transit (IPSec, SSL). We even have established hardware standards to support this on PCs and servers (Trusted Platform Module, or TPM). Given these existing standards, what the heck are Intel and Oracle talking about? My guess is that they are using some or all of these encryption technologies. If so, why the marketing spin?

For instance, someone can put all their social network and identity information onto a tikitag and affix that to their business card that can display that information on the Internet when swiped over a tikitag reader. Tikitags can be applied to toys and other products so people can get more information about the products online. And cell phones can be used to grab data off a tikitag affixed to a poster to get more information and buy tickets for events.

The service will go into public beta October 1 and it will be available on Amazon for $49.95.

SAN DIEGO–Tikitag, an Alcatel-Lucent venture, demonstrated a new product at DemoFall that enables people to use RFID wireless technology to link any type of offline device or paper with information online.

Companies can put tikitags, small tags that stick onto things like Post-Its, which contain data, onto products or business cards. Tikitag readers can read the data off the items and provide additional information and services online.

He said that in order to make the collection of identifiable information palatable for consumers, it has to be noninvasive and familiar to people.

“People are doing it because they recognize the security and convenience trade-off,” he said.

But more widespread use of biometrics, especially by the government, raises substantial privacy concerns that may alarm many Americans and prove difficult to resolve, panelists at a conference here said Tuesday.

Conor White, chief technology officer of security systems vendor Daon, said consumers are growing more comfortable with the use of biometrics on an everyday basis, as evidenced by products like the Registered Travelers card, which identifies travelers who pose a minimal security risk.

At some level, it’s already becoming commonplace: California and some other states demand fingerprints from driver’s license holders. The Verified Identity Pass program includes iris scans, as does the U.K’s border control system. And prisoners have their blood forcibly drawn for a DNA sample.

The program is currently transitioning from collecting two fingerprints to a 10-fingerprint standard. Mocny said US-VISIT is also pursuing other forms of biometric identification, such as iris-scanning technology.

“How would I transact business, if I knew someone was following me everywhere and watching me?” asked Scott Hastings, president of the IT consulting firm Deep Water Point, who previously worked in the federal government for 23 years. “We need to grab hold of that and decide how that’s going to modify our behavior.”

CNET’s Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.

Hastings sat on a panel at a forum on identity management hosted by the Information Technology Association of America.

“The biggest challenge since day 1 with any service has been the privacy and security aspect of it,” said Chase Garwood, chief information officer of US-VISIT. He said the program extends to non-U.S. citizens many of the same protections afforded to citizens.

Homeland Security's US-VISIT program is moving from collecting two fingerprints to 10 at U.S. borders.

The increasing sophistication of identity management has had clear benefits, Hastings said. He noted how the rollout of the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration and border management system–United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology–has virtually erased the once-prominent problem of document fraud at U.S. borders. The US-VISIT program, implemented in 2003, involves the collection of biometric data such as fingerprints to monitor for criminals and terrorists at the borders.

“As biometrics increases worldwide, consistent standards are essential,” Mocny said. “We can transform the way the world travels.”

WASHINGTON–Is the idea of widespread biometric data collection still too spooky to win over the American public?

Some panelists suggested that younger generations are more accepting of handing over their personal information, but Dixon took issue with that point.

“They might share” their information online, she said, “but it’s their decision whom they share with–they don’t want the federal government collecting all of their information.”

“Will there be underground transactions? Will it affect our economy?” he asked. “When people (become aware of) the electronic footprints they leave behind, there will be a reaction.”

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon/CNET )

US-VISIT is the world’s first large-scale biometrics program, according to director Robert Mocny. He said the program has stopped 2,400 criminals based on biometrics alone.

Protecting Americans’ privacy at other borders presents an additional challenge, pointed out Mary Dixon, director of the defense manpower data center for the Defense Department.

Governments in Japan, Australia, the European Union, and other places have begun collecting biometric data at their respective borders as well. The United Arab Emirates has been utilizing iris scans for some time, Mocny said.

If you were to try to think of the two most diametrically opposed software companies in the industry, Red Hat and Microsoft come to mind. One is the open-source leader, while the other has tenaciously held to its proprietary software background.

Microsoft has the reverse problem. While it has occasionally forgotten that it’s a platform company, Microsoft is a platform company and should welcome all sorts of software on that platform. That means both open and proprietary, as well as mixes of the two. The more Microsoft remembers the need to strengthen its platform, the more it will necessarily embrace open source.

(Credit:
Matt Asay)
which introduced the complexity of supporting its products on Windows (at least 50 percent of JBoss’ downloads were on Windows) as well as business model difficulties: Brian Stevens, Red Hat’s CTO, once told me that he wasn’t sure Red Hat’s revenue model would work above the operating system.

Walk Red Hat’s Raleigh, N.C., campus and you’ll see Apple’s iPhone in the hands of an increasing number of Red Hat employees. Cross the country to Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus and you’ll see the same thing. I’ve been to both campuses in the past few months and was surprised by the number of iPhones being used.

This isn’t to suggest that either Microsoft or Red Hat is going to drop their differences overnight and become indistinguishable in their strategies. But both are growing out of their binary perspectives on the world, and that’s a very good thing for their customers and partners. In fact, I suspect that customers will ultimately drive out the bile and bitterness that has unnecessarily separated software that customers want to run together.

The further up the stack from the operating system Red Hat goes, the more it’s going to have to work with non-open source components, just as its Linux server business has always depended upon supporting the industry’s leading proprietary applications and databases.

See the pictures in this posting? They were taken while at Microsoft, not Red Hat. Microsoft knows it needs to figure out how to embrace open source.

Both Red Hat and Microsoft employees ultimately are consumers and care more about what works than dogmatically clinging to The One True Way to use or sell software.

This convergence is perhaps most easily viewed by the iPhone usage on both campuses, which suggests a pragmatism and affinity for “what works” that will increasingly see both companies abandon old dogmas and embrace customer realities.

The
iPhone.

It’s software, not religion. It matters, but not that much.

Ubuntu @ Microsoft

Red Hat believes that real customer choice comes from an open ecosystem of software. Microsoft believes something similar, but prefers customers buy into its own software ecosystem (Windows, SQL Server, SharePoint, etc.) and stay there.

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

Microsoft's internal open-source education

Bringing PHP into the Microsoft fold

And yet, something has brought the two companies together in a manner which suggests to me that both are converging in the way they view technology:

commentary

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

Microsoft grapples with Linux.

There is, of course, a very good reason for this, and it should send a ray of hope to those who believe that open source and proprietary software are destined to live out binary, partisan lives:

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

It wasn’t always thus. Ironically, Microsoft and Red Hat have shared a common problem, though they have appeared diametrically opposed at a superficial level. The proprietary/open-source divide has sharply split the two companies, but even as Microsoft’s cold war against open source is thawing so, too, has pragmatism crept in at Red Hat.

For Red Hat, the big shift came with its JBoss acquisition,

Once, I found a European site offering a compilation that included Dancing on the Planet. I tried buying it, but it didn’t pan out. I also scanned various file-sharing sites and caught the occasional whiff of it. But still, the song was no more than an unimpeachable memory.

Serial song searching
For some people, tracking down missing songs is a serious pastime, since music is so important to so many and we all have those tunes we heard one time when on vacation or danced to with a certain special someone.

Note: If you’ve used YouTube to find a song you’d been long searching for, please leave a comment with the name of the song and a link to it.

In the small hours of a summer night when I was in college, I heard a song play on San Francisco’s famous Live 105 that seemed, at the time, one of the most profound, melodic, and catchy tunes I’d ever come across.

“I had been looking on every file-sharing service in existence, from Napster on,” Taylor said. “I found a 12-inch remix on BitTorrent, but like most 12-inch remixes of the day, it’s a bit crap. I remember the song as being a bit spooky and surreal and time-travel-like.”

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that YouTube would prove to be the terminus for the search. In fact, after finding Dancing on the Planet, I immediately checked off another decade-plus hunt on the site as well: Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s original studio version of The Show, one of the first great rap songs.

“Presto,” he said. “The YouTube version.”

“After searching for so long for that recording,” Lien said, “I was thrilled to finally see it again. This four-minute piece of footage was my Moby Dick. I knew it was out there, but it had always eluded me.”

And it turns out that YouTube, a service that was never really supposed to be about music, is many people’s choice for tracking down the songs they’ve longed to hear for years, but couldn’t find.

“It started when I was in Bangalore, India (in) 2006,” Steenson said. “My friend Udai…wanted to show me a Raj Kumar song (and YouTube) was the best way to find it. It’s only increased since then. And now it’s a few times a week that (her boyfriend) and I end up DJing back and forth on YouTube….It helps to find specific live performances we remember from TV shows, things that once upon a time I had on bootleg VHS.”

Lien, of The Sound of Indie blog, said he’d set up Google RSS feeds that automatically alert him if, for example, a song he’d been looking for turned up on YouTube.

Suffice it to say, it’s hard to live up to the profundity of college-era memories, and Dancing on the Planet turned out to be a fun, if not great, dance track. But this sudden, unexpected end to a very long-standing personal mystery left me startled.

In the comments section, I discovered I was hardly the only one who had used YouTube to reunite themselves with Dancing on the Planet.

“Probably 15 years ago, I remember seeing The Wedding Present perform (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah) on the Conan O’Brien show,” said Kevin Lien, who runs the music blog, The Sound of Indie. “I put a video tape in to try and record it, but…I missed it and have been on the lookout for it for nearly 15 years. Then all (of a) sudden, it pops up on YouTube one day.”

Reading between the lines of that comment, my sense is that since the songs I’m writing about are all way, way below most people’s radar, it’s unlikely anyone is going to complain. Plus, some of the songs were posted by the record labels themselves.

Like my experience with Dancing on the Planet, though, Taylor said finally uncovering 5 Minutes was somewhat bittersweet.

Some time after the Google era kicked in, I began looking for it, finding it listed here or there on some random music site, the artist identified as Dave Storrs. But there were few clues as to how I could get a copy.

“Is there anything I’m looking for that I can’t find?” Steenson said. “Some, yes: Indie bands from Minneapolis and elsewhere in Minnesota that are long forgotten. But someone will put them on YouTube, I’m sure.”

And Steenson suggested that it’s just a matter of biding one’s time.

Then there are the songs that still, inexplicably, haven’t turned up on YouTube.

“It’s been great fun,” Steenson said, “to dig up songs I’ve had in my head since 1990 and that I’ve not heard since.”

He noted that one YouTube user, known as herecomesmongo79, rips old vinyl and posts the songs on YouTube along with purchasing information online. The idea is that this user is trying to promote the purchase of rare, out-of-print vinyl that would otherwise go completely unheard.

To Chris Taylor, a San Francisco journalist, the meeting of the Palm V and Napster, circa 2000, was a “perfect storm” for being able to easily write down the names of songs to hunt for later and then to actually try to find them.

In response, a YouTube spokesperson told me that, “We offer copyright holders choice as to what they want done with their videos: Whether to block, promote, or create revenue from them, in a way that is simple and straightforward. We cooperate with all copyright holders to identify and promptly remove infringing content as soon as we are notified.”

Another friend who heard that I was looking for people who had used YouTube to find rare music, asked if there wasn’t some risk that by writing this article, many of the songs I identified in it would be removed, since many of them were posted by people other than the legitimate rights-holders.

It was called Dancing on the Planet, and even back then–in the late 80s or early 90s–a rare track I never again heard on the radio.

“It sank without a trace shortly after making an impression in the charts,” Taylor said. “It’s so funny how that happens. You hear a song on the radio every day for two weeks, then nothing at all ever. Like it went into the memory hole. It never existed.”

For Taylor, the resolution came one day when he decided to Google the song.

And YouTube is also helping Steenson rediscover songs that she remembers from spending her high school years in Germany.

But one friend I contacted for this story pointed out that there is a solution for some feeling Taylor’s frustration.

“Not only is the track rarely as good as you remember,” he said, “but also, you hear it on YouTube, but you can’t download it to iTunes…Like, why did you post it (there) and not on LimeWire?”

But exist it did. And because it was one of the very few songs on the list on his Palm he couldn’t find, “its mystique increased.”

For years, it was jammed in the back of my memory, always there as this incredible song that I just had to find.

But Taylor said one song he’d been seeking for at least eight years–5 Minutes (Uncle Eric), by Mainframe (see video below)–had eluded even his most assiduous attempts to find it.

Lien said he’d actually tried finding it on the service several times before, to no avail. But then one day, someone posted it.

But a couple of weeks ago I had the inspiration to search for the song on YouTube. A quick, 21-character search string. Suddenly, with no fanfare, nothing to herald the conclusion of what had been at least a 15-year hunt, it popped up (see video below): the elusive song itself, accompanied by an obviously unofficial 1980s-era space-themed digital video.

Taylor said his eagerness and persistence about tracking down 5 Minutes was due to the song’s quick rise and fall.

For Molly Steenson, a Ph.D. student at Princeton, YouTube has provided her and her boyfriend a way to DJ at home. They can track down songs they previously had no other way to find.

“Damn,” wrote someone calling themselves gforcekaras. “(I) never thought I live (long) enough to hear this song again. Thank you so much for uploading this!”

The current version of mobile Internet Explorer, seen here, leaves a lot to be desired. A new version, based on the same rendering engine as Internet Explorer 6 for the PC, promises Flash support and other improvements.

Navigation may be better on the iPhone, but IE 6 will have some advantages, such as full Flash support.

SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft still isn’t quite ready to release its new
mobile browser, but I did get an advance look at Internet Explorer 6 for Windows Mobile at a Microsoft event Wednesday night.

That’s left Windows Mobile device makers scrambling to try to better compete against Apple’s browsing experience. To fill the gap, many are turning to Opera’s Windows Mobile browsing, which offers better navigation and rendering than the current mobile Internet Explorer.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The biggest benefit will be the fact that it is the full IE 6 rendering engine, meaning that any page that renders properly in IE 6 on the PC should do just fine on Windows Mobile. Tim McDonough, a senior director in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile unit, showed me the browser running the standard MSN home page.

McDonough didn’t offer much of an update on timing for IE 6, except to say that “it’s still this year.”

Another interesting option on IE 6 is the ability to quickly shift from a site’s mobile page to its standard desktop version. Just because IE 6 can show the full site, doesn’t mean that’s always what people want. It’s particularly true in Europe where even so-called “unlimited” data plans typically have data caps that can easily be reached by loading a lot of standard Web pages. IE 6 toggles between mobile and standard Web pages by sending a different user agent, depending on which page type a user wants to see.

I saw the browser running on Windows Mobile Standard–meaning on a non-touch-screen device. The browser makes good use of a D-pad controller to go from link to link, but it’s still not as elegant as on a touch screen. I’ll be interested to see how the browser works on a touch-based Windows Mobile device, but am still not expecting navigation to be up to the
iPhone level.

“The market today is really at ‘Can I see a page?’ Very quickly we’re getting to ‘Can I do something?’” he said. “That’s where we will really shine.”

Microsoft and Yahoo are like two teenagers who can’t decide whether to go steady, break up, or just be friends.

They are once again speaking to each other, as News.com first reported on Monday. Several sources tell CNET News.com that the latest talks involve a deal short of an acquisition.

The moves come as Yahoo is gearing up for a road show to fend off a proxy bid from Carl Icahn.

Another source pointed out that Microsoft’s latest statement (issued June 12) remains true–basically that Microsoft is not interested in a full purchase but remains open to talking about a search deal.

“I can tell you categorically that’s not happening,” one source familiar with the situation said of the possibility of a full-on acquisition. Earlier in the day, TechCrunch reported that Microsoft was interested in buying all of Yahoo, though at a lower price than the $33 a share it was once willing to pay.

In any case, it appears Yahoo investors see any interest from Microsoft as a good thing. Shares of the company rose above $23 a share on Tuesday, though they gave up some of those gains up later in the session, changing hands recently at $21.82, up 1.7 percent, or 37 cents.

News.com’s Stephen Shankland and Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.

I’m as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that’s too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts.

As the best place to find friends, colleagues, and thought-leaders in any industry, Twitter is the obvious choice as the only micro-blogging service that should be found in your social network portfolio.

Although Diigo’s highlighting options are useful, ZigTag’s semantic technology tries to improve bookmarking, and Ma.gnolia aims at providing a more thorough solution, none compare to Delicious. Yahoo’s social-bookmarking service now features a streamlined search function, which makes finding bookmarks simple, and its new design makes it the most intuitive social-bookmarking service on the Web. But Delicious’ most useful offering–its
Firefox add-on–has nothing to do with the site at all. By installing the Delicious add-on, users can tag pages on-the-fly without being forced to visit the Delicious homepage. Granted, its competitors have Firefox add-ons as well, but after using each, it quickly becomes clear that they simply don’t work as well as the Delicious tool.

MySpace still provides value and Hi5 could be a significant competitor in just a few short years, but for now, Facebook, with its addicting features, applications, and growing community, should find its way to your portfolio as you leave the others out.

Social Network keeper: Facebook

But now that 2008 has passed and it’s time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don’t we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more time on multiple services isn’t nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with the best services, right?

Why choose Facebook when MySpace is still the world’s most popular social network? It’s simple: Facebook doesn’t have the awful design found on MySpace profile pages, offers a huge, engaged community, and most importantly, it’s growing at a rapid rate, which means all those friends who still hang out at Friendster, LiveJournal, or even MySpace are starting to make their way to Facebook.

And it’s that professional content that I find most valuable when it comes to YouTube. Sometimes, I want to find a music video that isn’t available elsewhere and YouTube will have it. And when I’m feeling nostalgic and I want to watch an old clip from The Wonder Years, it’s sitting on YouTube waiting for me. As a bonus, some of the user-generated content is pretty good too, though most of it is strange.

News Aggregation keeper: Reddit

Maybe YouTube is the safe choice for the only social video site you should keep in your network portfolio, but I simply don’t see how anyone can choose anything else. Vimeo is nice, but much of its content is barely watchable and while Metacafe is still an interesting site worth visiting, it doesn’t provide the professional content that YouTube does.

Video site keeper: YouTube

Social bookmarking services are extremely handy when you want to remember a site at a later time, but that doesn’t mean they’re all created equal. In fact, Delicious, the leader in the space, easily sets itself apart from competitors like Ma.gnolia, Diigo, and ZigTag by boasting a better interface, more users, and better tagging, which makes it easier to find and share bookmarks.

Choosing the single social network to use while ditching the rest isn’t easy, since most of us have friends scattered across Friendster, Hi5, and MySpace. But it’s because of those few friends still clinging to the past that we hold on to all those social networks. Enough is enough. It’s time to rebuff the rest and stick to Facebook.

Micro-blogging keeper: Twitter

Social bookmarking keeper: Delicious

Trying to find the ideal news aggregator on the Web can be difficult. Depending on your definition, there’s conceivably hundreds of services that package the best stories into one page. But it’s the “social” news aggregation services, like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon that lead the pack. And although Digg is the most popular service in that grouping, I’m a firm believer that Reddit deserves to stay in your portfolio as your chosen news aggregation service.

I’ll be the first to admit that I complain about Twitter as much as the next person, but after using competing services like Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Plurk, it’s not hard to figure out that it’s the only worthwhile micro-blogging tool.

Normally, I would pick the social site that offers the largest and most engaged community. But when it comes to news aggregation sites, Digg simply doesn’t cut it. Sure, it’s the biggest and arguably the most important to content sites, but that alone doesn’t make it the best. Instead, I find Reddit’s site design, while simple and ugly to some, incredibly useful and designed to help users find the best stories as quickly as possible without gaudy extras. But the most important differentiating factor working to Reddit’s advantage is its community. It might be smaller than Digg’s, but generally, the comments on each story are more edifying and lack the invective that has become a staple for Kevin Rose’s brainchild.

Reddit may not be the biggest, its site design may be odd, and its community not as rabid, but in terms of providing interesting stories on a slew of topics without as much “gaming,” it leads the pack and deserves to be in your social network portfolio.

Taking all that into account, I simply don’t know why it’s worth using another service besides Delicious. It’s a superior tool with more convenient options, offering the same basic functionality as its competitors. It’s the cream of the social-bookmarking crop.

I know that anyone can make a case for why practically any user-generated video site on the Web should be the exclusive service in your portfolio, but when it comes to finding the obscure, professional, or just plain weird, YouTube is the only place to go. All the others are practically useless.

Granted, Twitter still doesn’t offer groups and I wish it had an element of open source like Identi.ca, but the sheer number of users who comment each day on Twitter makes it the best choice for your social-networking portfolio. If you want to be a part of a community that’s both lively and engaging, you won’t find it anywhere else but on Twitter. And now that it’s more reliable and the Fail Whale is an occasional annoyance instead of a daily occurrence, Twitter has become an even more compelling service.