Clove social-media application may be the anti-Skimmer
Your Tech Weblog, Julio Ojeda-Zapata
I'm a sucker for social-media desktop apps like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and Tweetie, so I was fascinated by Skimmer when it was released earlier this year.
Skimmer, developed by Minneapolis-based Sierra Bravo (or the "Nerdery") for Minneapolis' Fallon, integrated major social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Flicker and YouTube into a single, elegant program. It was the sexiest Adobe AIR-based app I had ever seen.
Sadly, Skimmer has since languished (though it has continued earning high praise).
No mobile version of the app ever emerged at a time when handheld use of social networks is exploding. No outside-developer access ever materialized so the geek masses could augment Skimmer's capabilities.
So will Clove be the anti-Skimmer?
This also-Minnesotan social-network app (also AIR-based) superficially resembles Skimmer in that it aspires to integrate multiple services into a single interface. But its developers are also aspiring to openness in allowing third parties to create all manner of plug-ins for the program.
Clov is due to be officially released in beta form next week. It will initially give users access to their Twitter and Facebook accounts (though this wasn't fully functional in a pre-beta build I tested), as well as multiple RSS feeds. Support for more services, like Flickr, is coming.
But things will get more interesting, developers Craig Condon and Tim Erickson say, when outside Clove developers begin to combine or "remix" information from two or more social networks or other sources.
In one example they've been concocting, product specifications from the gdgt.comsocial-networking site for gadget lovers would be blended with pricing information about those products via BestBuy.com (and its Remix technology).
Condon and Erickson have built a company dubbed Spice Apps upon Clove and other apps, all named after spices. There's Basil, a Web-based audio player in development, and Ginger, a Web video player.
The developers clearly have high ambitions, but some of the claims made on their site (related to Clove, for instance) are not yet backed up with actual code. The screen shot shown here bears only a passing resemblance to the version of Clove running on my Mac, for one thing.
Condon and Erickson are getting marketing help from a third partner, Kim Garretson, who aims to offer "themed" versions of Clove in partnerships with other companies.
One themed app in development is dubbed "Living Home" (named after a CD-ROM-based publication from more than a decade ago). This variation of Clove would pull in decorating, design, remodeling and gardening information from a variety of Internet-based sources and display them within the application.
This isn't a new strategy; themed variations of TweetDeck have been released, for instance.
By Julio Ojeda-Zapata on October 21, 2009
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