What’s the addition that’s making me all excited? It is, of course, notes! Now, this may not sound like a big deal, but in a little way, it is!

See, Google Reader not only provides a nice interface for you to enjoy your daily aggregator-run, it also lets you share certain items with friends or the world (which, if you’re Scoble, is the same thing). Up until now, you needed to be subscribed to the whole feed in order to share single items. But with the notes bookmarklet, whenever you add any posting or website you stumble upon by appending a note, you can also share that item.

For people like me, who not only use the sharing function, but also add their shared items via the feed to their tumblelog, this is a fantastic way to consolidate something I would usually have to either add manually or facilitate via the usage of yet another imported feed. If you know what I’m talking about.

In addition to the notes function, the GReader team has also added three additional themes to style the page that displays your public shared item. The offered themes are a bit, well, off, so I guess they are more a proof of concept than anything else. But see for yourself, in this announcement on the official Google Reader blog (which is the easy way out for someone who just can’t be bothered to actually take screenshots).

Unless of course you don’t have a clue what box.net is, what GMail does and what the hell a 3rd party app constitutes. In which case I’ll gladly clear that up for you.

Box.net is an online storage service (meaning you upload stuff to their servers, so you can access it from wherever you are). They’ve been around for ages (meaning around two years, which in web2.0 terms is more than just ages, it’s eons). They provide a stable service, and over time have added new features like the ability to share your files with others, hence creating a social-network based on the sharing of your files. And a short while back they opened up their platform, allowing other applications to be used with the files uploaded to box.net. One such example is the integration of picnik.com, a webbased image editor (also the official editing tool for Flickr).

And today they announced support for not only Outlook (which hopefully will perish sometime in the next five years) but also GMail (which hopefully will take over the world within the next five years).

What does that mean for you, the user? It means you’ll now be able to upload files to box.net and then send them to other people via GMail (or Outlook). Which is not exactly how it works, as box.net doesn’t exactly make GMail send the file, it just automates the process of publishing the file and then sending the link to the file to someone else. Fair enough.

So while that doesn’t sound like a revolutionary new service, it makes life a bit easier, which, in the end, is the only thing we expect from the web.

Anyway, K2 behaves nicely with WP2.5, even though I can’t use the K2 sidebar manager. Which really isn’t that much of a problem, considering that I can’t see any difference between built-in sidebar widgets and the K2 sidebar widgets.

All in all, good stuff. The WP2.5 backend really is a touch nicer to look at, even though there’s no revolutionary change discernible. I guess that’ll have to wait for 3.0 release.

But, and this holds true for everyone residing outside the US, they won’t actually show me any clips. Which renders it totally useless and an utter failure in my book. Over at Mashable, Stan Schroeder comes to the same conclusion, writing:

And you know what? As a user, I don’t care what the reasons for this are. I don’t care about copyright. For me, the site doesn’t work, and that means it has absolutely zero value. The Internet knows no boundaries; if you try to set up artificial ones you’re going to fail, period.

I totally agree. Even though the website explicitly states that they only cater to US-residents, there’s still no need to laud that. It’s an infliction brought to us by the abomination that’s international copyright law that websites that actually offer content suitable for international audiences, like video, can’t do so.

Hulu’s main goal was to counter the unauthorized use of copyrighted content on sites like YouTube or DailyMotion. Well, they won’t have much luck in that regard, the way they are doing business now.

Lifestreaming, a new buzzword I’m most comfortable with, has had its iron grip on me for a few weeks now. I’m constantly checking out new services, with one goal in mind: to consolidate all the services I’m using on the mighty Intarwebs (for everyone fed up with constant ironic misspellings of what any other person would call the data-highway, I’m sorry, I just can’t resist).

There are various approaches to the problem, and every approach has been tackled by a few services. And now that even Yahoo! has been chiming in with their own version, namely the profile page of their acquired service MyBlogLog, the once rocky introduction of activity feeds has arrived in the safe harbour of mainstream acceptance. And when that’s the case, it doesn’t suffice for a service anymore to just have an idea, it has to execute it well to a certain extent.

One such service is Friendfeed, which lets you aggregate your activity on a certain number of services and then add friends (who ideally are also using the service - you can add “imaginary friends”, but that’s only half the fun - similar to real life). It’s a good service, but limited in that it only connects the dots via RSS feeds, and instead of aggregating your existing contacts from all the various services you have plugged in, you have to build yet another circle of contacts within FriendFeed.

Another approach, the API connecting one, is used by SecondBrain, which I’ve already written about. They plug into the services you’re using and create a library of the content you’ve been generating over the years. What they neglect, just as FriendFeed does, are the contacts you’ve got within those services. Meaning you’ll have to build up your contacts all over again.

Enter socialthing! , which, like SecondBrain, connects to your services via API and, tada, creates a contacts activity-stream. Yes, finally it’s a service that doesn’t focus on what you are doing, but rather on what your countless contacts scattered all over the web are up to.

Ironically, the execution is rather anti-social, as the stream is not public and doesn’t offer a feed either. Which is fine by me, considering that it’s my contacts, and I am the only one who’s interested in the activities of that motley crew.

Right now they are in closed beta, accordingly the service is still quite basic. Which is not a problem, as the service they are offering doesn’t need a whole lot more than what they’re already doing. There’s only one thing on my wishlist: a widget (or an API so people can create them).

Now, what is it that differentiates Jaiku from other micro-blogging services, most notably the larger-than-life but downtime-ridden competitor Twitter? Well, first of all, it’s fast. I haven’t tested it for long now, but unlike Twitter, it actually opens up the links I click. Which is, let’s be honest, fucking rad!

Difference #2: Jaiku is a lifestreaming service. While Twitter was refreshing in its simplicity when it launched, sooner or later one just longs to spice up terse text-messages with a few shenanigans. Jaiku lets you import RSS feeds from Flickr, YouTube and whatever blog or service you see fit. Thus, it rivals sites like Tumblr or new-kid-on-the-block FriendFeed (which I just recently wrote about here Actually, I thought I did, but what do you know, I didn’t).

Just like Twitter, Jaiku offers integration with your mobile phone, letting you update and receive Jaiku content. IM is supported as well, setting it all up is a breeze.

And as has been mentioned on this site already, Jaiku is doing a good job when it comes to community building. How? Well, there’s something called channels, and it’s a not a whole lot more than the grouping of people around a certain topic, area, etc. While this doesn’t sound too spectacular, it’s something that comes in handy for creating microcommunities on the fly (which sounds a lot like a marketing phrase, and I think I just invented it, and I’m sort of proud of it now).

All in all, Jaiku provides a compelling service, and while it suffers, like so many social networks, from a lack of mainstream adoption, I hope Google will have learned from their Dodgeball disaster and help Jaiku to bloom rather than whither (and I am, officially, a poet).

* I received my invite via Jaiku Invites, a website that facilitates the sharing of invites. It worked like a charm, I absolutely recommend it!

But surely, no feed reader would do this, right? Well, there’s one. Fav.or.it. Launched today into private beta, it shows this message to users (click to view in full):

Well, here you go. If those stupid users weren’t so inconsiderate as to try to import their feeds, the feed reader would actually work. I don’t really care how many great new features, including commenting of posts directly from the reader, a reader has. As long as I’m told what to actually read, it sucks. Ass. Especially when it’s used as an excuse for not scaling.

Well, I think that’s a fantastic move. With other webbased photo editing services cropping up like mushrooms in a humid forest on a spring day, this helps to really draw people to your service (and keep them there). I guess there was a reason why Flickr decided to partner with Picnik for direct editing of Flickr photos, and why Picnik is the default application to edit photos stored on Box.net.

Evernote, previously known only as a very popular notetaking application, has ventured forth and is planning on conquering the web as well. Complementing that new webversion, Evernote offers a beta desktop version, which lets you synchronize your content. And here’s another plus: The Windows version of the app (a Mac version is soon to come) can be installed and run via WINE on Linux. Apart from a single button you better not click, the app is working flawlessly on my computer. In case you don’t trust my word, here’s a little screenshot:

So what is it Evernote can do for you? For one, it can do what I so elegantly displayed above: recognize writing in an image, even handwriting, and even when it’s written by me and photographed using a crappy cameraphone. Meaning you can just take an image of a handwritten page, put it either into the desktop app or send it to the webversion (either way, since they’re synchronized anyway) and the search function will find whatever’s written on that piece of paper.

In addition, Evernote offers a webclipping bookmarklet, letting you clip images and text right into your Evernote notebook.

And since we’re all social, you can publish your notebooks too, like so:

http://preview.evernote.com/pub/stormgrass/Public/

Go on, click it.

Well, what can I say. I’m impressed. Even though there are other notetaking services online (most prominent ones being Google Notebook or Zoho Notebook), none of them offer a service as sophisticated as Evernote.

Unlike other services like FriendFeed, Tumblr, Profilactic, and a myriad of others, SecondBrain actually doesn’t just want your lifestream, it wants your stuff. Yes, that’s right. Plugging into the APIs of the services you want them to track, they’ll import everything into your SecondBrain account.

Now there are good and bad sides to that. The good one? It’s really a library of sorts, aggregating and making searchable the content you have created online. This is clearly a lot better than what most other lifestreaming services do, especially since SecondBrain imports all of the metadata associated with your content too. Thus, you get a real tagcloud of the stuff you do online.

Now, here’s what’s bad: Needing the service to access an API makes it a lot less flexible. Right now they’re supporting 11 services, which is good for a start, but simply not enough when you want to give people the ability to aggregate all their user generated content. Adding RSS feeds is not possible, so you are stuck with the services SecondBrain offers.

SecondBrain also lets you import your documents from Zoho and GoogleDocs, switching the status of the documents to private automatically. This is what I expected, but I also expected them to not show people that I’m actually synching my GoogleDocs (which SecondBrain does, as it displays publicly what services the lifestream’s owner is using).

Apart from that library focus, SecondBrain gives users the option to add content to SecondBrain directly or to comment on another user’s items. Of course you can decide to follow other users’ lifestreams as well.

Overall SecondBrain is a good service, even though the lacking support for RSS feeds is making it a lot less flexible than many of its competitors.