Image by coldacid via Flickr

It took long enough, but in my defence, I'm only one guy. But yeah, Taskerrific is up and in private beta, although it feels more like an alpha release to me.

Image by mattbatt0 via Flickr

FriendFeed 2.0 came out in beta today, the social aggregator showing off a number of changes to its service. It's a lot nicer than the classic FriendFeed, but I'm not here to talk about what's new and improved; half the blogs out there have already covered that ground. Instead, I'm going to complain about the move to real-time.

Image by coldacid via Flickr

I'm going to be away for most of the weekend, but before I head out, I want to talk a little bit about Taskerrific. I hope to have the service up and in public beta by the start of May, and in the meantime, I'll give occasional updates into the progress of Taskerrific's development.

With social networking, one of the more important things is how users connect. It might be the defining feature of a social network. And usually, from the user's perspective, it's pretty simple. Usually. But what happens under the shiny surface of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?

Image via CrunchBase

Google. A bottomless pit of bandwidth and storage space, and quite a few bucks in the bank. Yahoo. Struggling to survive, and resources certainly nowhere near what Google has available. So why is it that Yahoo's Flickr photo hosting service offers unlimited space to users at $25/year, while Google's Picasa caps you at 10GB for $20/year? Something doesn't seem right.

A friend and I are currently developing a new social app, the details of which we're keeping under wraps until we're ready to start inviting in testers. However, before we get to that point, there is still a lot of design and development work which needs to be done. One important thing that needs working out is the membership system, as I'll explain.

Quite a few bloggers, Robert Scoble included, have stated that the real-time age is here, heralded in by the flood of traffic over Steve Jobs' recent announcement of a leave of absence from Apple. Excellent!

Image via Wikipedia

Back on Sunday, Mashable put out a list of predictions on how Twitter would change blogging in 2009. The first prediction in their list was "tweetbacks", or a way of showing tweets that reference a particular blog article. Well, not two days later did someone actually create them. Social media pro Dan Zarrella whipped up a Tweetbacks system that went live on Tuesday, followed by an update on Thursday.

Here's a list of the communication, Web 2.0 and social networking sites and tools that I've come to love the most over 2008. The list is by no means exclusive, but these are the ones I've had the most experience with, and wouldn't ever want missing in my online life.

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

If you're reading this blog, you probably know about Last.fm or iLike, two services for sharing what music you listen to, and how much you enjoy it. Some bright folks in Amsterdam have come up with the idea of doing the same thing, but with the applications you use, rather than music. In a nutshell, that's Wakoopa — a service for letting everyone know what software you use, and what you think of it.