If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Kwippy is a fun new service that allows you to post comments from Gtalk or Yahoo! It is very easy to get set up on kwippy, which is nice, and makes it a great site for introducing people to microblogging.

So, let’s get started!

Kwippy is in private beta right now. Beta means that the site is running, but might be taken down occasionally for upgrades, changes, etc. Of course, anymore, there’s not a lot of difference between a site that is ready for public use and one that’s in beta. Look at all the updates Microsoft sends out.

A private beta is one where you have to have an invite to join it. On kwippy, an invite has to be mailed to you, so either post a message on here and mention that you’d like an invite, or if you prefer, go to kwippy’s main page and ask for an invite to be sent to you.

Here are a few simple steps to give you a quick start to using kwippy:

1. Once you get your invite, click on the link and go register.
2. After you’ve registered, the next thing you should do is add kwippy to your IM.
   

   Click on Dashboard to bring up the IM instructions. Currently kwippy works with Gtalk and Yahoo! but there are plans for other IMs in the future.

   
3. After you have your IM set up, go back to your kwippy homepage and you’ll be asked if you want to integrate status changes with your kwippy page. Doing this will automatically post on kwippy whenever you make a status change on your IM.
   
   Note that you need to click the X, not the word here.
4. Now you’re ready to post! With kwippy, you have 2 choices. Either send a post to kwippy over your IM or go to your kwippy page and write a post.
   
5. Whenever someone responds to your kwips, you will be notified by IM. You can also choose to be notified by e-mail.
6. You can also respond to others kwips on the website. If you look at the picture above, you’ll see “go comment” underneath each. Clicking on that takes you to a kwip comment page. By the way, don’t worry if you have a lot to say, kwippy doesn’t have a text limit.
   

Now that everything’s set up, here are some other things to check out:

A social site is about friends, and kwippy is no exception. You have unlimited invites if you want to ask all your friends to come play and there are already a lot of great kwippers on the site.

Kwippy has a great search feature that allows you to either search for kwips or for people, so it’s easy to find friends from other sites. By the way, feel free to add me as a friend too.

To add or remove a friend, look to the right on the kwips board, directly underneath “everyone’s kwips” and click to follow or unfollow.

You can also click on change settings on a friend’s page and choose to subscribe to their kwips if you’d like to be notified over IM whenever they make one.

If you want to remember a kwip written either by you or someone else, you can mark it as a favorite. Simply click on the heart icon underneath the kwip.

To view kwips that you’ve marked as favorites, go to your page and look underneath your avatar. Click where it says the number of favorite kwips you have to go to your favorite kwips page. If someone marks one of your kwips as a favorite, you will receive a message letting you know.

You can also visit someone’s page and send a private kwip to them. You will get a notification when they respond to the message you sent, or when someone sends you a private kwip. If you are trying to reach a friend who hasn’t been on lately, you can also send them a Buzz, which is a kwip sent to the person and shows up in their inbox and as an IM message.

Just a couple more items to mention. Just like plurks and tweets, kwips are searchable on Google. They’re not showing up yet, but that’s because kwippy is a new site and likely still getting indexed.

Each page on kwippy can be subscribed to via RSS feed, so you can subscribe to your posts, friends’ posts, or even a single kwip that you want to keep up with the comments on.

In addition to kwippy’s search features, you can also find posts by using the url. Kwippy has one of most unique url set ups that I’ve ever seen, with the goal of making them “human readable”. So, if you know who wrote a kwip and when they wrote it, you can go right where you need to go to find the kwip.

Finally, if you are a fan of ping.fm, you’ll be happy to know that kwippy is there too! If you’re not on ping.fm and want to be, the most current code is “thispingsforyou”.

By Guest Blogger: Marc Berry

Marc and his wife write real talk about all areas of relationships, from sex to abuse to pure love and the language of flowers at The Incurable Romantic. Marc is also the author of techne-eikon, a blog about Web 2.0 and Internet Marketing. Follow Marc on FriendFeed and Twitter.

You can also follow Teeg on FriendFeed and Twitter.

FriendFeed for the Socially Inept - Part 2
Read Part 1

Once you have your friends listed in your FF profile, you can start adding the services that you use. The available services are:

* Amazon.com
* Blog
* del.icio.us
* Digg
* Disqus
* Flickr
* Furl
* Gmail/Google Talk
* Goodreads
* Google Reader
* Google Shared Stuff
* iLike
* Jaiku
* Last.fm
* LibraryThing
* LinkedIn
* Ma.gnolia
* Mixx
* Netflix
* Netvibes
* Pandora
* Picasa Web Albums
* Pownce
* Reddit
* Seesmic
* SlideShare
* SmugMug
* StumbleUpon
* Tumblr
* Twitter
* Upcoming
* Vimeo
* Yelp
* YouTube
* Zooomr

Once you’ve done that, your FriendFeed will automagically be updated with all your online activities.

Your friend’s (and their friends’) activities will also be posted to your page for your convenient perusal, and your activities will be posted to theirs (assuming that they have also added you as a friend).

There is one other feature that I just discovered today that I would like to mention: FriendFeed Rooms. FF Rooms are mini FriendFeeds that are usually centered around one topic or group of people, rather than all the diverse activities happening in your network, all at once. I don’t know much about Rooms yet (I did say that I just discovered them today), but I like the idea that I can further refine my FF for certain areas of interest, rather than needing to scroll through multiple pages of updates to find whatever has my ADD fuelled attention at the moment. Rooms can be made public or private, with the public version getting posted to your public feed. There are possibilities here that have me intrigued….

All in all, FriendFeed is wonderful in its simplicity, and does a excellent job of bringing some semblance of order to the chaos that is my online network. I almost feel like I can actually go from socially inept to socially adept, via my FriendFeed profile. Hopefully. Yes, I think that FriendFeed is my newest, bestest friend.