MoodBlast is an excellent little app that allows you to update your status from one place. It currently supports the following services:
Unfortunately, MoodBlast is Mac-only, but there is a web application called HelloTxt that looks like it will achieve the same thing.
It’s been about a year since I last looked at Flock, the “Social Web Browser”. In that time it’s matured into a very stable and useful application, perfect if you are into social networking and blogging. Some of the sites that it integrates with are:
Interesting article from The Economist on how social networks may be falling into the same trap that AOL and Compuserve have done in the past.
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.
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.
Wow, and I thought that starting a blog would only increase my hermit tendencies!
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.
An interesting post on how different IM providers are embracing open standards:
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.
I’ve got to that point again: I’m bored of social networking. This has happened once before, with MySpace to be precise. This time it’s Facebook.
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?