We believe that FriendFeed and MySocial are great products, but they are distinctly different from Minggl….not only in features, but in the types of sites we each currently support.
Lets start with a distinction between “newsfeed” style items, and personal, actionable items.

If you and I are both users at Facebook, and you:
1) invite me (friend request)
2) poke me
3) email me (message)
4) wall post
5) send event invite
6) notifications (coming soon in Minggl)

Your FriendFeed friends (mySocial users included) WILL NOT (based on our testing) see this activity, nor will they know that they need to respond to you. The same is true for Social Thing….even if your friends add both of these as Facebook applications (not required with Minggl).

Your friends who are Minggl users WILL receive all this in their MingglStream sidebar (near real time), without ever having to visit the Facebook site or use a separate application.
The same is true for MySpace events, which none of the other aggregators support, and LinkedIn which the aggregators do support (but only at a level similar to Facebook).

In summary, our “newsfeed/MingglStream” (a small portion of our total feature set), offers much more complete support for the big social sites than anyone we’ve seen to date.

Furthermore, none of the “aggregators” give you automatic navigation (including site login) from within your browser, or the ability to tag and categorize friends, or email groups of friends on different sites. Minggl provides an instantaneous way to login to all your accounts, and jump to your inbox (for example) without being bothered with the intermediate page visits. Our next release will let you filter the mstream (newsfeed) based on Site, and Event type. After that, you’ll be able to Filter based on friend tags as well.

And, as you will see shortly, Minggl contains quite a few (currently hidden) features that will further highlight how we differ from the “social news aggregator” category. We consider ourselves to be a much broader social management tool, and intend to lead in the more “personal” dimension of social/lifestyle management.

Thanks for your feedback and for your ideas for improving the Minggl service.

Regards,
Dewey Gaedcke
CEO of Minggl

In response to concerns over the Firefox beta 3, we’re working on it, but less than 1% of the Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn communities are using this beta, we’re stabilizing our other services, while letting FF3 stabilize as well. You can rest assured that we’ll have it.

Yes, but their developers should be building for the current and future versions of Firefox. Only making it available on FF 2 is taking a step back.

Honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone would build a business that relies on every social networks continuing to allow free and open access to their data. Sure, FB has an API which is great, but that’s the tip of the iceberg of the problem that Minggl is trying to solve– how do you maintain hooks into OkCupid, Ning-based communities, Yelp, Twitter, Linkedin, Bebo, etc. This stuff isn’t useful unless you can aggregate many many communities. And you can’t do that unless you have a browser plugin.

The other interesting advantage that Minggl has is that, like Diigo, and Flycast (from way back in 99), the toolbar creates a “level” above any given web page for social annotations. Users can put Minggl Notes on their page that are only visible to other users, which could then easily include space for ads.