Synthasite is going to be very popular. Like Sitekreator it has a wide variety of templates to choose from, and the team has a few ideas on how to help site creators integrate with third party web services as well. It has significantly more functionality than Google Page Creator. However, the beta product is only working currently in Internet Explorer (Firefox will be released soon), and we had a lot of trouble with the site repeatedly crashing and closing down. When we persisted, the results were good, though, and we assume that there will be no public launch before the the site is completely, or at least mostly, stable.

We’ll have a detailed review just as soon as it’s available on Firefox (and therefore Mac) and compare/contrast to Sitekreator.

I went by the Facebook offices on Monday to see a demo of what’s just been launched. The two products show information about people and things as they occur. The first, News Feed, appears on the user’s “Home” (admin) page and shows new photos posted by friends, relationship status changes, people joinging groups, etc. It basically removes the need to go to every friend’s site every day to see what changes occured to their profile. In many ways this reminds me of my RSS stream of news that I view every day in NetNewsWire, for the blogs and other sites I care about.

The second product, Mini Feed, is a variation of News Feed but shows information only for a single user and appears directly on their profile page. It gives visitors to the page a quick view of what’s new for that user.

Like everything on Facebook, both of these products are subject to the standard Facebook privacy settings. This means only people you allow to view this data will be able to see it. What appears is based on who you are, who they are, and what rules are set.

These changes will confuse users for a while, but I agree with Ruchi Sanghvi on the Facebook blog who says “These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.” It’s interesting because Facebook clearly gets the idea of an attention metastream, where page views aren’t the currency that matters but rather how effectively the service allows users to communicate. Facebook users will now have a much easier way of staying up to date on what their friends are up to. It may mean less page views for Facebook in the short run as users rarely have to leave their home/admin page to see what’s going on with friends, but if it makes users love Facebook more (is that possible?), it’ll pay off in the end.

The screen shot below shows the News Feed rolling in on a Facebook user’s home/admin page.

Unlike other social networks that are focused on people, MingleNow will be based primarily on locations like bars and other venues. Nearly 900,000 physical locations will have dedicated MingleNow pages at launch and users will be encouraged to upload photos and stories from those locations. Users will also have fully customizable profile pages. MingleNow emphasizes the viability of its service for events promoters. Users who bring in friends and populate the site with photos, stories and reviews will receive points towards real world discounts, early event notification and VIP access to select events. The service will kick off with public events at venues around the US this fall.

Online/offline tie-ins are becoming increasingly common; from coupons from Google and Cellfire to Partystrands, social music recommendations in public venues.

MingleNow will offer a personal calendar so people with various levels of permission see what a given user will be doing in the future, where and with whom. At launch the calendar will import and export to and from GCal and ICal; the company says they hope next to add syncing with Outlook. The company is partnering with a variety of third party services to provide functionality like mobile access and group SMS and voice messaging to co-ordinate events.

The site’s search by tag and criteria for people and places works well. There is something about this that makes public events a little more sterile and packaged than I’d prefer if they are vetted by my personal profile and preferences prior to co-ordinating with friends, but in an increasingly on-demand world many people may want just that. The scores of venue pages on MySpace could certainly be far more functional and in MingleNow location pages will be.

There are also RSS feeds, maps and recommendations throughout the site..

I badgered the company about OpenID or some other means of importing and exporting data across social networking services, lest this be just one more silo, and they indicated that they were in discussions and experimentation regarding those concerns. We’ll see.

There is certainly no shortage of social networking sites available, but the combination of a large semipopulated database, real world incentives and mobile connectivity all at launch is interesting. Especially if MingleNow offers quality events and incentives, doesn’t have a large barrier to entry and ends up allowing users to bring in some of what they’ve built elsewhere, they may bring a fresh take to a potentially exhausted market.