Today, Yahoo have released a beta iPhone application called oneConnect. One of the cool features is Pulse, which shows you status updates from your friends on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Very handy.

Yahoo! oneConnect™ for iPhone. A new way to stay in touch.

…Fire Eagle is about helping you take your location to the Web and giving you control over how, when and with what your location is shared. You choose which applications can share and update your location. You choose how much information you want to share – from as broad as country or state, to as detailed as zip code or cross streets, and everything in between. You choose when and how to update your location.

Fire Eagle is open!

• Skype
• iChat
• Adium
• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Pownce
• Jaiku
• Facebook

Unfortunately, MoodBlast is Mac-only, but there is a web application called HelloTxt that looks like it will achieve the same thing.

MoodBlast
HelloTxt

• Facebook
• Flickr
• Twitter
• Youtube

Flock

Two of the biggest online phenomena of the past couple of years—social networks such as Facebook, and virtual worlds such as Second Life—look an awful lot like AOL did in 1994. They are closed worlds based on proprietary standards. You cannot easily move information in and out of them: try shifting your Facebook profile to MySpace, or moving a piece of clothing or furniture from Second Life to Entropia Universe.

Ringside Networks are addressing this problem with the “first open source platform” for social networks, Ringside Social Application Server.

• Internet communities | Break down these walls | Economist.com
• Ringside Social Application Server

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy. We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.

Welcome to Fire Eagle!

The research, from Swinburne University of Technology found that “people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog” after a two month blogging period when compared to people who do not blog.

Blogging Is Good For Your Social Life: Study

Consider that everyone IMs. Websites come and go – but IM remains. What’s important about that is that your social network persists over many, many years. My friendster buddy list is essentially useless – since I no longer use that site. But my AIM buddy list, which I still use, has been around for over 10 years. And with XMPP, it’s now reusable. It could become the standard machine-readable way to represent a social network.

IM 2.0

After building up a list of contacts which include friends past and present, I’m finding fewer and fewer genuine reasons to log in. Occasionally I’ll go in to look at photographs that contacts have uploaded. But more often than not, I’m struggling to find any genuine reason to use the site.

I think this might be a common problem with social network type sites: the initial contact building phase is indeed good fun, but it doesn’t last forever. And what you are left with is a site that has little attraction apart from the odd quirky application: (fluff)Friends anyone?