Recent changes to both FaceBook and FriendFeed have rendered them much more like Twitter. I talk a bit about FriendFeed’s changes over on the TouchBase blog today, and Triston has discussed FaceBook’s ongoing upgrades here. One of the side effects of being more like Twitter is having an increased noise level in general on FaceBook and FriendFeed, and even more so from people who update to all services.

I use all three, and up until recently was unable to figure out how to satisfy my need to share some of my Twitter thoughts across the three networks easily without being a nuisance feed to my friends on FaceBook and my subscribers on FriendFeed. I tried auto posting my Twitter feed to my FaceBook status for a while, but what was slightly obnoxious before the upgrade quickly became unbearably noisy after it. I didn’t feed my Twitter posts to my FaceBook status for long, choosing instead to do manual updates. If you still do feed Twitter to FaceBook continually, I highly recommend you discontinue your auto feed to FaceBook from Twitter. I assure you, you are driving your friends nuts.

I was also feeding my Twitter stream to FriendFeed, a practice I did not stop until yesterday. With a list of people I follow and talk to in the thousands, you can imagine how noisy this was, and how annoying the @ replies were to FriendFeed users, as there was no way to pick and choose. Regardless, I use FriendFeed as a true content aggregator for almost all of my blogs and networks, finding Twitter a more effective place for me to make connections with people, so I let that one ride for a while. I kept looking for alternative solutions, but until this week had not found one.

TweetDeck has been my Twitter client of choice since I exceeded 1500 people in my stream (up until then I used Twhirl, an excellent program, especially if you manage several client accounts). By allowing me to sort, filter, and many other things, it does what I need it to do. TweetDeck released a beta upgrade recently that allows you to integrate FaceBook. More importantly, it allows you to pick and choose which tweets you send to FaceBook using a handy toggle switch to the right of your post.

This is huge, and solved my river of noise problem on both services. As a rule I tend to want to share a few tweets here and there with people on FaceBook and FriendFeed, and the type of tweets are usually the same. This means I was able to unhook my Twitter account from FriendFeed completely, and instead add my FaceBook statuses to aggregate to FriendFeed. Now I simply click the toggle when I want to share a post with all three networks to generate conversations with people in all three places. This sends my tweet to FaceBook as my status, and then to FriendFeed. Voila! Noise problem solved. Now my friends on FaceBook and my subscribers on FriendFeed only hear things that are valuable, and not hundreds of @ replies a day.

If you are a FriendFeed beta user, you can control the outgoing noise to Twitter as well, since courtesy works both ways. Next time you post to FriendFeed, if you are using the beta (which I highly recommend, it is much improved over the old look and feel) when the CC:Twitter toggle pops up, click “Settings” right next to it. Then turn of the default auto post to Twitter, and only click the toggle to send to Twitter once in a while. Both betas, TweetDeck with FaceBook and FriendFeed, allow us to all be more courteous and genuine with each other. That’s a good thing.

The platform is attractive in its simplistic presentation. When scrolling through my stream on my Macbook Pro, the application reacted smoothly, and I’ve yet to experience any hiccups or delays in any functions. One of my biggest complaints with some AIR applications, such as Twitter platform Twhirl, is that they tend to be a little slow on the pick up and reaction time. No such issues here.

The platform allows you to work in a large-screen mode or in a “widget” mode, which shrinks down the feed to the bare necessities. Coming to my first issue with the platform, the smaller widget really isn’t what you’d call small. Though you can change the height of the window, the width is fixed. That wouldn’t be a big deal if the widget mode changed the size of each update displayed, but it doesn’t…and each update is sizable in display.

In fact, the whole platform, for all its clean simplicity, is a bit bulky in its presentation. There’s a lot of unused space that could be eliminated, making the platform more streamlined and aesthetically-appealing. For those of us with limited screen real estate, using every centimeter of space is crucial. Skimmer doesn’t have any skin or display options to change; if it did, I’d love it. But on a positive note, that’s my biggest gripe with the platform.

Moving right along, Skimmer allows users to update their various accounts from the platform…no suprise there. But unlike some platforms, where updating your status on a platform linked to multiple accounts doesn’t allow you to update each account differently, Skimmer lets you select which account to which your update will be posted. Or, if you like, you can post the same update to all accounts. Personally, my activity on Facebook is different than it is on Twitter or Youtube, so I like to update each individually, but to each his or her own. This feature earns a big check-plus from me.

Users can also filter their feeds easily, selecting which accounts they’d like to incorporate into their streams. Sometimes I just don’t care whether my friends are updating their Facebook profiles, or what they have to say. Uncheck Facebook from your stream directly the Skimmer application, and you’re set.

I particularly like that Skimmer renders pictures and videos uploaded to all the different services it supports right in the window. I won’t drop names, but I watched a particularly..unique..rendition of the Disney song “A Whole New World,” a YouTube post, right from Skimmer. If I’d had anything constructive to say, I could have commented on the video directly from Skimmer as well. Nice.

Continuing with more cool features, you can filter your stream down by keyword, friends, and platforms. Skimmer does display your friend avatars (or profile pictures, whichever you like), and next to the images are small little platform icons, indicating which platform the update is coming from.

I’ve just started using Skimmer, so I’m certainly not fully familiar with all of the platform’s features, but I will certainly continue using it. If you’re out there, nice folks at Skimmer, you’d have one very happy customer if you let me skin the thing or make the appearance a little less bulky. Pretty please?

UPDATE: Still, I guess Skimmer is really delivering on exactly what it claims to do. As far as viewing your social stream, the platform excels. But when it comes to communicating, such as sending messages on Twitter, the app is lacking. For instance, when I received a tweet from a friend, there was no indication that the entity in my feed was in any way different from the rest of the noise. Lucky I saw the tweet as it came in; otherwise, I would have had no clue that I’d been contacted.

Skimmer is just that. But, if the team over at Skimmer was to add in a bit of functionality that focuses on communication, such as differentiated postings so users can know when they’re being contacted, then we’d have a serious application on our hands. I think it is a contender against my partner Leslie’s preferred tool, Strands, or the tech crowd’s favorite, FriendFeed.