Almost.at: Follow Social Conversations in Real Time

Services like Twitter, FriendFeed, and even Facebook allow you to network with your friends and stay in touch with what's currently going on in their lives--not a week ago or last month, but you can read what they're doing today, or even what they're planning for this evening. At the same time, you can use these services to stay on top of events taking place around the world, like the post-election protests in Iran or the most recent space shuttle launch--whatever people are talking about. The trouble is that all of these services offer different views of world events, and you have to visit multiple sites in order to get the full picture. Enter Almost.at, a Web service that collects blog entries, news headlines, posts to social networks, and multimedia like photos and videos to help you follow and absorb important events in real time, as they happen.More after the jump.





Almost.at allows you to see how the conversation around a particular topic or event on the Web is changing as it happens. The service pulls in posts to Twitter, popular blog entries from around the Web, video from YouTube and photos from TwitPic and Flickr to give you a dashboard where you can monitor what people are saying about an event as they say it. The page gives you a timeline you can use to scroll back and see how the conversation has changed or evolved over time and refreshes regularly so you're always on top of the conversation. If you're a Mac user, you can download a standalone Almost.at application that runs on your desktop and updates regularly. For the most part, Almost.at is a passive service. You can't post to Twitter from it, and you can't respond directly to something someone's said. You can't add your own photos or videos, and you can't search for new blog posts or add one you've written to the fray. If you click on a particular video or photo, it opens in a new browser window, and if you click to read a blog entry you're directed to the entry itself; the service doesn't allow you to watch a video or read a post inside the window. You can however add specific Twitter users who are at the event so their posts are included if they're not already.