You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.

Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.

Enter any query into FriendFeed’s search box and you’ll see a constantly updating stream of items related to it. It works for advanced searches too. Best of all, it also searches through comments left below items. And these results can even be embedded in other blogs, as you can see right now on the FriendFeed blog.

FriendFeed now lets you individualize your account with six new designer themes. When you select a theme, your FriendFeed account will always include your theme, and other people looking at your profile page will see it in whatever theme they have chosen.

FriendFeed says that it plans to allow users to customize themes down the line as well as give users the ability to create an entirely new theme. Twitter and Gmail also let you add themes and designs to your homepages but some of FriendFeed’s themes have a nicer design, in my opinion. On the other hand, Gmail has a good amount of variety when it comes to choosing a theme. The advantage to Twitter’s themes is that you are able to choose multiple designs in different colors.

People have always been inclined to join mobs - most people have at least one story to tell about a time that they got swept up in or had to face a crowd demanding justice for one thing or another (both of my experiences were in college). The Internet has proven to be a frighteningly efficient tool to create virtual mobs. But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break.

I’m going to pick on FriendFeed in this post because I believe it is the nearest thing to Shangri-La for mob justice enthusiasts. I explain why below. But first I want to compare FriendFeed to Syphilis, which may have been the “perfect” disease when it first hit Europe in the 15th century. Today Syphilis takes years to kill its victims and is easily treated with antibiotics. But back in the early 1500’s it led to certain death within months.

The killer features of FriendFeed continue. Today, the service has just added a way to share files on the service. So now it’s just as easy to share a PDF or text file as it is to share a picture. “You can attach (almost) any file to your FriendFeed posts via the web interface or by emailing file attachments to share@friendfeed.com,” FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor says.

And what’s really great about this is that using FriendFeed direct messaging aspect, you can easily transfer files to certain individuals, or groups of people at the same time.

Facebook has had a big week. The social network finally caught up to MySpace in the U.S., according to ComScore. News leaked of its upcoming Everyone button. And Facebook made some significant improvements to its search capabilities. Now the social network is improving its inbox’s interface, which previously was a little clunky and difficult to organize.

The new design gives you filter options at the top of your inbox to help you identify unread messages as well as to report any spam, or unwanted messages you receive.

A few months ago, Twitter significantly updated its new follower email alerts to show you information such as how many followers that person has, how many tweets they’ve sent, and how many users they were following. It’s a decent indication of if the person is someone you actually would want to follow back, rather than making you click through to the site to get that information. However, it was still lacking some context, such as what that person actually tweets about. The service FriendFeed has rolled out an update that adds this context.

Now, when get an email alert from FriendFeed that you have a new subscriber, you get a big FriendFeed logo, followed by the user’s icon and a link to easily “Subscribe back.” Below that though is the key part. You now see: “Here are some of the things XXXXX has recently shared on FriendFeed,” followed by three recent FriendFeed updates from that user. On each of those items there are also links to easily comment or “like” any of the items.

True Ventures backed Socialcast is launching adopting the freemium model for its FriendFeed-like collaboration and social network SaaS for businesses. A finalist for the 2009 Crunchies Award for “Best Bootstrapped Startup,” Socialcast is a communication tool businesses can use to incorporate social networking with real-time messaging to share knowledge across enterprises.

Socialcast’s software combines social bookmarking features, Twitter-like microblogging and FriendFeed-like streaming into one platform. And the software integrates with other social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. Socialcast can also import activity from your iPhone, Gmail account and YouTube. The best part is that all of this activity is private, making Socialcast a competitive program for real-time, internal communication within businesses.

By now, you’ve probably heard all about the controversy surrounding the Iranian election and subsequent protests. If not, check here for a solid roundup. And you’ve probably also heard how this has spilled over into the tech world because Twitter has been one of the key points of contact between those inside Iran dissenting, and the outside world. If Twitter escaped being blocked by the Iranian government, you’d think FriendFeed would have too, right? Nope.

FriendFeed has been “almost completely blocked” in Iran, co-founder Bret Taylor tells us. You might not think this matters too much since FriendFeed is much smaller than Twitter in terms of users, but the service was hugely popular in Iran, Taylor says. In fact, Iran is one of the service’s most active countries, and it is the most active region as defined by comments per user per day, according to Taylor.

Here’s a question that’s been running through my head ever since Michael posted about FriendFeed being in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses: exactly how many startups out there are trying to be the one social networking service aggregator to rule them all, and how many is enough?

It seems like every day startups come up with new applications, be it for desktop, Web and/or mobile phone, that essentially want to be the gateway to our online lives. In reality though, there are not that many people who want - let alone need - continuous access to multiple social networking services, and even if they do, how many people (outside of the tech industry) do you know who are genuinely waiting for a extra third-party that helps them manage all their online personas?

Talk of how to monetize Twitter, both from its founders perspective and a third-party point of view, is dominating conversation on the web these days. Tweetbucks, a startup founded by entrepreneur Chris Sukornyk, is hoping to make money for users of Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed through leveraging affiliate fees and CPCs from ads.

Here’s how it works. Tweetbucks has a database with thousands of online merchants that offer referral fees (or money you get from merchants when your advertisements of a product result in a purchase ), including Amazon, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble and Shoes.com. All you need to do is find a product on a retail site, enter it on Tweetbuck’s site, and the startup will automatically shorten (via Bit.ly) and convert it to an affiliate enabled link, referencing the site’s data base of online merchants that pay out affiliate fees. You can then add the link to in a Tweet, Facebook status update or FriendFeed message.

It turns out that people are following more than just their friends online. Look at the comScore chart above comparing unique visitors in the U.S. to FriendFeed versus Twine. Yeah, I was shocked to see that Twine has more than three times as many unique monthly visitors as FreindFeed (714,000 vs. 188,000). On a worldwide basis, comScore shows FriendFeed still slightly ahead of Twine. ComScore doesn’t always do a great job with small sites, so I checked Compete, which shows Twine with 2.25 million monthly visitors in April versus 998,000 for FriendFeed (see embed below). Different numbers, same story. While FriendFeed is organized around following feeds of your friends’ activities across the Web, Twine is organized around interest feeds.

Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos.

What does this mean for how we will come to consume information?

While Twitter is busy removing features, or half removing them, or whatever — FriendFeed continues its relentless pace at adding new ones. The latest one today is small, but potentially very, very useful. Basically, you can now get emails/IMs/pop-up notifications from any group or individual user on FriendFeed.

While it may not be so obvious at first, this is useful because you can custom tailor FriendFeed to use even when you’re not on the site. The way I’ve been using it for several months now is to create groups for people/things I’m particularly interested in. But that would still require that I go to FriendFeed to check those groups. Now I can just get pinged over IM every time something I’m looking for comes up.

When Facebook redesigned its homepage in early March in a wholehearted embrace of the real-time activity stream as its primary user interface, everybody complained. “Why on earth does the world need 2 Twitters?,” asked one of my friends on Facebook. Twitter-envy aside, some early data suggests that embracing the stream was the right decision after all.

Since the redesign went into effect, Facebook’s growth has accelerated. After flat 0.3 growth in February, Facebook added nearly 4 million unique U.S. visitors in March (up 6.6 percent over February), and another 5 million in April (up 10.3 percent over March) to end at 67.5 million domestic uniques, according to comScore. That puts it within kissing distance of MySpace’s 71 million unique U.S. visitors in April, by the way (see chart below), and keeps a healthy 50-million visitor gap with Twitter, which added 8 million U.S. visitors in April alone.

Today saw the launch of two new real-time search engines, from OneRiot and Tweetmeme. While the two are slightly different in ways that I went into earlier, all that really matters are the results you get. So I put those two to the test along with Twitter Search, Google Search, FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. To see which would give the best results based on a current event.

One bit of news I was interested in was the space shuttle, because it received some damage today while venturing into space. I decided to do a pretty generic search for “Space Shuttle,” since that is likely what most people would enter of all the possible combinations of words. Here are the results:

As they mature, social networks are increasingly becoming viable systems for information management. We’re seeing this with Facebook, and with FriendFeed and even to some extent with Twitter. The combination of social graph plus information is a powerful one. And that’s exactly why CubeTree wants to port that idea over to the enterprise world.

CubeTree’s new enterprise collaboration suite, which is opening to the public tomorrow, has a familiar look: It looks like a cross between Facebook and FriendFeed (more-so before they were both recently redesigned). And that familiarity is part of the idea to getting this to work on the enterprise level. As with other social networks, there are two main components to CubeTree: The Feed and the Profile. But on CubeTree’s feed, instead of seeing updates from everyone in your social graph, you see updates from coworkers. And on your profile page, rather than highlighting pictures or videos of yourself, there is an emphasis on information and documents.

We all know about Twitter’s downtime today. It was a scheduled maintenance service that was supposed to last for about an hour. Sure enough, after about an hour, Twitter came back — but only partially. Over the past hour since it’s been back, it’s been up and down, but mostly down. And now there’s another problem, FriendFeed is down too.

FriendFeed, aka, the first alternative to talk about Twitter when Twitter is down, has completely lost contact with its data center, co-founder Bret Taylor tells me (hey, Twitter once lost a database, so this is nothing new). They’re investigating the problem right now. But where are we supposed to turn? Facebook? LinkedIn? Orkut? Scoble must being going crazy right now.

I’ll be honest. I have no idea what Kim Kardashian does. I wouldn’t even know who she is if it weren’t for jokes on Pardon The Interruption (an ESPN sports show) about some sex tape a few years back. But apparently, she joined FriendFeed the other day. And then she immediately added 35,000 users as friends.

Now, she did this thanks to FriendFeed’s new one-click Twitter login functionality. This allows you to sign up for FriendFeed using your Twitter name and transfer your information over via OAuth to FriendFeed, as well as automatically friend anyone you are following on Twitter. It’s a smart move by FriendFeed, as it ports your social graph over from a more popular service. But this simplicity and close tie into Twitter raises a couple concerns.

A lot of people use Google Reader as their primary RSS feed reader, so you’d think its social features would be extremely popular. But they’re really kind of lame, and extremely underpowered. And Google knows this, that’s why it’s continually shifting the way it presents the social elements. The latest change today allows users to more easily find and share with friends of friends. That is to say, if you have a friend sharing an item with you, and another one of their friends comments on it, you can now get access to that friend.

This idea isn’t really anything new, in fact, FriendFeed (aka the primary source of Facebook’s innovations these days), has been doing something similar for a couple of years now. The reason for doing this is obvious: If you don’t have a lot of friends on a service, the friend of a friend element pipes more content into your stream to make things more active, and thus, more appealing to use. But FriendFeed is doing this much better than Google Reader is, so far.