Five minutes later, I sounded like a grumpy old man with this:

Great. People are connecting their Twitter to Google Buzz. Now I can ready your fucking status message SIX times instead of five.

Yeah, every time I try to type “read you”, it always comes out “ready your”. Ignore that. But here’s the point. We’re all on a bunch of social networks. We have them connected to each other. It’s getting ridiculous. I was checking out a friend’s Facebook page last night. There were actually two status updates of the same Flickr photo that was pumped through Gowalla.

Gowalla. Let’s start there. I don’t give a fuck that you’re at Stop & Shop. All the times that I post about my kids taking a crap? That’s me paying you back for Flickring your tweet of a Gowalla Facebook status that you’re getting milk.

Maybe I’m just jealous that I don’t go anywhere.

But anyway, as a hyperconnected kind of guy, I try my best to keep up with my friends. The duplicate postings make this so much harder and much more irritating. I bitched about this before when Ping.fm was all the rage (what the hell happened to them?). You become tempted to not care what anyone is doing, but then you’re losing out completely.

The truth.

I have my Twitter and Facebook accounts linked. I don’t feel good about it. But I actually don’t have a ton of friend overlap there. Facebook is a mixture of family, high school friends (I apparently had a couple more than I realized), guys from my baseball sim league… and a few folks I keep in touch with on a daily basis via Twitter. So, those folks—the ones I’m probably connected to the most—see my stuff twice. Sometimes that’s okay… you don’t usually get to read EVERYTHING people post to Twitter, so it can be a good safety net.

What Facebook does have is excellent filtering tools. You can easily make lists of people you don’t see updates from on other networks. I do this. I have all of my Facebook friends in at least one list. The ones that tend to post to Twitter I just don’t check as often (even then it is really to make sure I didn’t miss anything).

There has to be a better way.

I thought FriendFeed was going to solve this. I really did. They allowed you to feed all of your public data into one stream. Theoretically (and I’m not sure if they ever did this), they should be able to cut the duplicates out and make life easier. They even had a pretty innovating feature called “imaginary friends” where you could make a fake FriendFeed user stream for your friends that didn’t have accounts. So, if my friend was on Flickr but not anything else, I could add his photos to my stream, for example.

It just didn’t work, though. And I’m not sure why. The imaginary friend feature was a lot of work and wasn’t intuitive. You also couldn’t consume non-open data (like Facebook status messages). That was a pretty big drawback. You still had to check Facebook.

What we need.

Moments after that first tweet/rant, I followed up with:

Someone make a tool that aggregates Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. and removes the dupes. Make it slick. You’ll be rich.

We’re smart people. Someone should be able to build something that automatically fetches (and updates) your connections to your social networks—Twitter, Facebook. Buzz, Flickr, etc.—and trims the dupes. Bonus points for allowing you to merge the contacts from these different networks so you can tell it they are the same person (which could also help distinguish between real dupes or a friend reposting something by another friend).

Maybe this tool could be Google Buzz. I’d be pretty happy if it was. I’m already a Gmail user. One reason I think Buzz stands a fighting chance is that I don’t have to leave my email app to check my other communications. That’s actually quite compelling.

I wish I had the time to figure this problem out and make an app. But the job keeps me busy and the three kids keep me busier.

That and all my spare time is spent reading that you’re picking up the fucking milk.

Turns out, the problem is that my friends on Facebook were basically my friends on Twitter. So, by the time I checked out Facebook, everything I was seeing was old news.

Time passed, and something happened. More people joined Facebook. And I’m using it more and more.

The people I’m finding on Facebook now are people from high school… people from college… people from old jobs. As it goes more mainstream (and the early, core users probably hate this), more and more people sign up. And those are the folks that weren’t already on Twitter, Flickr, or FriendFeed.

So, suddenly my Facebook news feed is no longer a list of tweets I’ve already read. It’s updates from people I’ve only recently connected with after (sometimes ten) years of silence.

Some Facebook (re)connections:

• Guy from high school who showed me this band called “Nirvana” about a month before Nevermind was released.
• Girl from college who I ran into outside of Build-a-Bear with our respective batches of children. She still looks the same as in college.
• Guy from a couple jobs ago who felt bad that he kept his job while the rest of us were laid off, so he meticulously edited everyone’s resumes (he was a kickass editor).
• My sister’s friend who asked me to her junior prom. I went and we had a great time. But Facebook is the first time we connected since then.
• Bass player of the band I was in circa 1995ish. He was a huge Toadies fan and had a pet squirrel that just walked in his house one day and decided to hang.
• Girl from high school who I traded mix tapes with. She gave me showtunes and I gave her indie rock. Neither of us changed the others’ taste, but I like to think we enlightened each other a bit.
• Girl from high school who was super cute and… I never told her that.
• Ex-girlfriend of my friend (my friend who I was in a band with for a while, is my wife Erin’s cousin, and is the person who introduced me to Erin). I’ll always remember her “X-Ray Techs Do It in the Dark” bumper sticker.
• Guy from college who’s doing simple, standards-based web design in Providence. Basically, he’s me. But we hadn’t spoken in about eight years until recently meeting up.
• Intern from a couple jobs ago who’s lasting effect on my life is introducing me to The Appleseed Cast.
• Best friend from grade school to high school, who’s house I would ride my bike to every day and we’d play baseball until it was dark. If it was raining, we played computer baseball.
• That guy’s little brother, who I have a hard time picturing older than 12 or so years old.
• Girl I worked at the grocery store with… I tried, but failed. But now we’re Facebook buds, so it’s cool.
• Ooops, another girl I worked with at the grocery store with. Tried. Failed. Was kind of the story of my life in 1996.

I know it’s cool for us “open web” advocates to openly complain about Facebook. But you know what? Without it, these people wouldn’t be in my life at all right now.

So, who have you reconnected with?

Hey, we’ve all been there. I chuckled. Great tweet.

Then my email dings. I get this friend’s Brightkite updates via email because he is local. I checked it. Same message. Throughout the day, I checked Facebook and FriendFeed. The same tweet was over there in the form of status updates.

The kicker was later seeing that tweet as a LinkedIn status update. I’m a pretty laid back guy, but I’m sure not going to post something like that as my “professional” status update.

So, what’s the problem here? This friend of mine uses a service called Ping.fm to update all of his services at once. This leads to two big problems: redundancy and context.

The Redundancy Problem

I follow this person (and many others) on several services. When the same message is broadcast over all of them, there are serious duplication problems. One of the reasons I loved FriendFeed was that it was a potential fix to this problem. You could now follow all of someone’s feeds in one place. But with the redundancy problem, FriendFeed becomes a mess.

Some folks will publish a blog post, tweet about it, digg it, save it to del.icio.us, Stumble it, then roll it and smoke it. So, the same post hits my stream a half dozen times. I know I can hide stuff in FriendFeed, but that involves a lot of per-contact strategy just to make FriendFeed usable again. Usually, I’d rather just skip it.

The Context Problem

Context is a big issue, too. Brightkite is a social network based on your location. So, any messages you post are affiliated with the last place you “checked in”. So, did my friend want to bite people just in that location? I think not, but that message is now affiliated with that place.

And LinkedIn? Are recruiters really into face biters? I’m guessing not.

Where I’m Redundant

I’m a bit guilty on two counts. I have Twitter update my Facebook status. I do this because I used to have very separate groups of contacts on Facebook and Twitter. Also, I wasn’t much of a Facebook fan and that was an easy way to keep that network updated. The truth is, ideally only some of my tweets would go into Facebook, but there’s no good way to manage that from within Twitter (which is where I update).

Also, I’ll occasionally tweet about a blog post I just wrote. I save this for posts I’m particularly proud of and thing more people than my small crew of RSS readers would like.

I’m going to revisit how I update Facebook. The tweeting of blog posts I don’t mind as much because I follow a lot of people on Twitter who’s blog feeds I don’t subscribe to. People seem to be good about really only tweeting links they want a response to.

But folks, for the most part let’s kill the automation and use these services as they were intended to be used

If not, I’ll bite your face.

When everybody was anxiously awaiting the new iPhone 3G, I just sat there and said “nope, not gonna upgrade—I like what I have.” No, I wasn’t in denial or just being difficult. It’s just that when you don’t really go anywhere, there’s not much of a need for things like GPS. And EDGE is pretty sweet where I am, so the 3G wasn’t all that appealing.

Plus there’s the fact that I’ve been with AT&T ever since they were Cingular (and actually had their shit together), so I’ve got some sort of grandfathered super cheap family plan that I’m not too keen on parting with.

But the big reason is that us iPhone 1.0 kids still get the software upgrade. That’s what I wanted. The software.

I wanted APPS.

So, a couple weeks after upgrading to iPhone 2.0, I wanted to share some of my favorite iPhone apps.

(Note that all links are to iTunes App Store)

Last.fm

During the first iPhone 2.0 weekend, if I saw one more tweet that said “OMFG Pandora for iPhone is sooooo awesome!” I… well, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. I just sat there on my high Last.fm horse saying “so what, Last.fm is still better… even with no iPhone app!”. Then Last.fm released an iPhone app. And I was thrilled.

The Last.fm app allows you to listen to a radio station of your music library (tracks you’ve scrobbled before), stations based on any artist you like, stations based on any of your friends or neighbours (those Last.fm users with taste most similar to yours) libraries, and—of course—a station of only recommendations based on your listening habits.

I’ll save the gushing of how much I love the Last.fm service, because I’ve already done so here many times before.

Wish List:

• The app must stay in the foreground to keep playing. Would be wonderful if it kept playing in the background.
• Artist bios (which are user-generated and generally solid) being available in the app would be nice.
• I would like to sort my Last.fm friends by musical compatibility rating (this is also something I want to see in the web app).

Exposure

Wow. I just found this one today and I’m in love. If you’re a Flickr user with an iPhone, get it. Right away. Everything’s here. View your photos. View your friend’s photos. View featured photos. View geotagged photos near you. You can even view and add comments to photos from within Exposure. This app is about as good as it gets.

There’s a free, ad-based version for free and a $9.99 version with no ads. To be honest, the ads are so unobnoxious there’s little reason to upgrade beyond supporting this fantastic developer. I’d have no problem with them cranking up the advertising level a notch.

Wish List:

• Judging by this Get Satisfaction thread, I’m not alone in wanting the ability to upload from Exposure to Flickr. Why not just email photos to Flickr? Because that compresses them to 640×480. I’d love to retain the camera’s 1600×1200 resolution.

Twinkle

Ah, the race to create the best Twitter app for iPhone. There’s Twitterrific. There’s Twittelator. But for me, it’s Twinkle.

Why Twinkle? It’s pretty, first of all. That’s quite important to me. I also like that it’s location-aware. I can see who’s tweeting near me (quite cool when I was recently on vacation). One limitation is that you only see the local tweets from those using Twinkle, not the entire Twittersphere.

Wish List:

• I do wish there was one dedicated screen for @replies (like it has for direct messages). Twittelator combines these, referring to them collectively as “Replies”. I’m cool with that.
• This one is a limitation of the Twitter API and not Twinkle, but I
  will never be able to rely on a 3rd party Twitter app until they lift the restrictions on API calls. I don’t have Twitter open all the time, so just getting the last 20 or so tweets doesn’t work for me. For this reason, I use m.twitter.com to read tweets more than anything else.

AIM

Quite honestly, it’s AOL Instant Messenger. It works as advertised. In this case, no news is good news.

Wish List:

• My thumb is large. It really is. It covers about 18 iPhone keyboard buttons. Being able to type on the landscape keyboard helps me immensely. I’d love to see this added to the AIM app.

Facebook

I’ve got this love/hate thing with Facebook. Let’s just say the iPhone app is 100% love. The profile browsing, while pretty click-heavy, is very slick. The message inbox is well done, too. I’ve always felt Facebook’s messaging system is it’s #1 feature. It’s so well done. The iPhone app even has chat, though I haven’t found myself using that yet.

Wish List:

• Not much… just let me type in landscape!

WordPress

I’ll admit… this one makes the list without me really using it much yet. But the potential is awesome. Being able to reliably work on blog posts on iPhone will be a huge help. The WPhone plugin has served me well, but feels buggy (especially comment moderation).

This is a very early version of the app, though, and it does need some key features.

Wish List:

• Again… let me type in landscape!
• You can edit local drafts, but not saved drafts on the server. This is kind of a bummer—and weird since you can edit published posts that are on the server.
• Comment moderation, please?
• Being able to post and edit Pages (and maybe even tweak the theme code) would be nice.

I have been using some other apps, but they just didn’t quite crack my “favorites” list. Among those:

Games

I was on vacation last week, so I had a bit of time to play with games. Most often, I played Aurora Feint, but when I installed the update, it blew away my saved game. I’m thinking I won’t have the time or patience to work my way back to where I was. Tap Tap Revenge is just… too cool. I also have played Jirbo Break a bit. Not bad.

For the Pre-Schooler

My daughter is 3 1/2 but is becoming an iPhone power user. She loves flipping between photos, exploring on the Google Map, or typing her name in the Notes app. As far as third party apps, she’s been enjoying Scribble, a very simple drawing game. She also has played JirboMatch (a memory game) and Bubbles (a very simple bubble popping time-waster) a bit.

What else?

I don’t know. I can’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the apps so far. I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but I’m not quite as excited as I thought I would be. I’m not really seeing any type of full featured word-processing apps or much productivity-wise beyond perhaps OmniFocus. iPhone definitely has the potential to be a viable platform, but I’m not feeling it is being taken advantage of yet. It seems that most of the innovation is in the gaming realm. That probably mimics the industry as a whole, but I’m not a gamer. I’d like to be wowed while being productive.

Again, I’m not sure what app it will take to do that. The WordPress app has the potential to be something along those lines. If the AIM app was actually Adium, I’d be far more excited. If the whole 2.0 update was a bit more stable, I’d be far happer.

So, what apps have been your favorites? What’s missing?

Well, of course the blog isn’t literally a resume. It is merely better than a resume. In many cases, you need that piece of paper that needs to be put in the hand of an actual person so they can read your blog and learn all about you.

I’ve kind of always wanted to teach. Finally, after many years of wondering how to go about that, an opportunity to dabble on the side has presented itself. The first step was to hand off a resume. Hrm. I don’t even keep a resume anymore. I mean, how can I? I’m the blog is the resume guy.

So, I worked around it, thanks to LinkedIn.

I cheated on LinkedIn with Facebook a little while back. It didn’t last long. I’m a LinkedIn fanboy again. I’m not going to go into all the reasons I prefer LinkedIn right now, though a lot as to do with Community Manager Mario Sundar and developer Steve Ganz (who I like to think of as Mr. hResume). The folks at LinkedIn just launched a new redesign today (go check it out if you haven’t yet), but the feature I’m going to talk about was in place before the re-design… I just didn’t need it until today.

In my younger days, I might have jumped at the chance to design a nice pretty resume in InDesign or whatever. Not now. I know I already have this data spread all over social networks. I want to get it out so I can reuse it. I have entered my work info in Facebook. But you show me an “export” button anywhere in Facebook and I’ll show you a flippin’ pegasus.

But check this out:

Yeah. Export to PDF. Boom. There’s my resume. It looks a-somethin’ like this:

It has clean type and layout, so I’m going with this. I only needed to make minimal edits. I opened the PDF up in Illustrator and added “• darowski.com” after the email address. I do kind of wish that your “Websites” were included in PDF export. Also, this position requested a list of software and languages. I documented elsewhere that I want to keep that out of my resume. But again in Illustrator I was able to quickly add it in.

How can you tell you like a feature? When you take all the time you saved and instead you use that time to blog about it.

As a Twitter user, what motivation do I have to go to Facebook just to read the exact same content? I’m starting to realize I’m just not Facebook’s target audience.

Confession: Here are a few things I’ve said about Facebook on this very blog…

I’ve even signed up. Like, less than a month ago. And let me tell you what—I pretty much have no idea why I should use it. It really is just a collection of the same activities that I do elsewhere. I mean, as a blogger, do I need Facebook?

Facebook, of course, doesn’t have an open RSS feed that i know of. They force you to visit the site. To me, that completely blows and is the #1 reason I’ll probably never use it extensively.

About all it is good for is the groups features (which I don’t even use because there is no RSS… so maybe it’s not all that good).

Then there’s OpenID and portable social networks (via Oberkirch). Once these reach their enormous potential, what really is the purpose of Facebook or MySpace?

As of now, I can only envision using it if it somehow crushes LinkedIn and becomes the #1 site for business networking.

Oh wait, what was that last one? Maybe I was on to something. For some reason, I’m using Facebook much more than I’m using LinkedIn now. In fact, when was the last time I signed into LinkedIn?

Why the change? LinkedIn allows me to connect with people. But I feel it just stops there. I can go back and check people’s resumes, but that’s really it. I’m starting to think LinkedIn is going to go down as one mammoth missed opportunity. I have 80 connections in LinkedIn. There is a lot of opportunity for information there. But all I get is a list of people that added new connections and the occasional job change.

I downplayed Facebook because everything I could possibly post to it was available already in a link from my blog, be it Twitter updates, last.fm charts, or what have you. Commenter (and former Aptima colleague) Nick Caler pointed out:

Adam, you actually gave the reason Facebook is so popular in your post. Its popular because everything is there, and more is being added through its platform api every day. Its a one stop look at the goings on on a person many differing sites. Where else can one see what your current music choices are and the pictures you’ve taken and find out what you are up to and see the people you know.

My response to that last question was “my blog”. But what Nick should have asked me:

Where else can one see what everyone else’s current music choices are and the pictures they’ve taken and find out what they are up to and see the people they know.

That’s where the value is. And I didn’t see that connection early on.

That said, just about every Facebook app I’ve seen is complete crap. But I’ve seen a couple that are beginning to shed light on what Zuck & Co. may have here. I’m a user now—and a fan—so I’ll be watching closely.

Joshua Porter posted a great article yesterday on Bokardo called “Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks“. In the post, Joshua says:

Sermo is a sign of a larger trend: the move to smaller, more specialized social networks that have custom tools to support a unique activity and may cater to a private or exclusive set of users. In this case it is sharing medical information among verified doctors.

I’ve blogged about Sermo in the past. I love what they are doing—creating an exclusive social network for physicians so that they can discuss medical issues long before they hit the journals (and are likely more candid than journals). Of course, they are raising a little hell as the pharmaceutical companies can no longer control their messages delivered to each physician. They are (gasp) talking to each other.

If it is possible to have a crush on a company, you know I’m in love with PatientsLikeMe. I left a comment about them on Josh’s blog, so I’ll just repeat myself:

On the other side of the medical spectrum, I’ve spoken with a few folks from Boston-based PatientsLikeMe, another example of a specialized social network. They are a network for the patients. I love that instead of Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought this…” intelligence, they have “patients at the exact same stage of ALS as you who are experiencing these symptoms that you are have taken these medications and felt these side effects.”

Ridiculously amazing.

The market of “just because” social networks is now bloated. In order to take off you’re going to need one of these specialized networks that offers something nobody else can. One key to that can be taking detailed profile data and using it to help foster your users’ social interactions (like PatientsLikeMe, and others such as last.fm).

Damn, reading that back, it sounds good. You can tell I love this idea. I recently joined Facebook. I yawned about it here. All I’ve done with it is insert widgets into my profile of specialized networks I have elsewhere (last.fm, Flickr, Twitter) and add friends that I have elsewhere. I find Facebook doesn’t really do anything more than my personal blog already does—act as an aggregator for all this information.

So, these specialized networks—last.fm (for tracking my music listening habits), del.icio.us (for storing my bookmarks), Flickr (for storing my photos), Twitter (for microblogging, public IM, whatever the hell you wanna call it), etc.—offer a hell of a lot more value than the “aggregator” social networks. You can easily hop to another aggregator (or create your own) and add the specialized content to that new profile. You still need the specialized services, but the Facebooks and MySpaces become expendable.

Then there’s OpenID and portable social networks (via Oberkirch). Once these reach their enormous potential, what really is the purpose of Facebook or MySpace?

personal value precedes network value

I guess that’s why to this day I still haven’t signed up for a MySpace account. I simply have no idea what I would get out of it. I have accounts with a few social networking sites and I’ve noticed that how much I use them more or less directly correlates to what personal value they have to me.

Here are eight social networking sites I have accounts with. Six of them I use enough to have posted links to my profile in my blog footer.

Twitter

Twitter is probably the application on this list I use most for “social” purposes. For those that don’t know, Twitter is an application that is compatible with all sorts of interfaces (web, email, IM, SMS, RSS, etc.) that essentially lets you get status updates from your contacts. It has been described as “microblogging”, “public IM”, or “public away messages”.

I started using it at SXSW, mostly because Evan & Co. were the darlings of the event. But I quickly started to appreciate the value. Not only can you subscribe to friends, you can also subscribe to industry professionals you enjoy learning from. Their Twitter feeds often contain interesting nuggets of information they don’t publish on their blog. That’s the beauty of it. It’s short (140 characters or less) and quick. You can publish and consume quick thoughts without needing to sift through large blog posts.

The basic personal value I get from Twitter is the ability to post short thoughts of my own without having to dedicate an entire blog post. Beyond that, it lets me keep track of folks who are doing the same.

Flickr

Flickr is an easy one. The personal value is public sharing of photos. The networking effects allow me to always have the newest photos of my contacts delivered to my RSS feed. It is a simple, beautiful thing.

Last.fm

I’ve written about Last.fm in the past. Last.fm tracks my iTunes music listening habits and creates charts from them. For many people, this would not be enough personal value to make it worthwhile. But for me, it totally is. I love this. I eagerly await my charts every week. It’s like fantasy football for audiophiles.

I’ve actually dipped into the networking side of things, as I documented my befriending of my #1 Last.fm “neighbour” (person in the system with listening habits most similar to yourself). I swear, Last.fm must think I’m a Scot.

LinkedIn

Honestly, I’m almost surprised I use LinkedIn. I signed up when a friend wanted to link to me and then I actually started using it when Steve Ganz deployed all those hResumes. Now that Mario Sundar is with them, I’m intrigued.

It requires minimal effort to add contacts, and there are some personal benefits. It is nice to see what old colleagues are up to. In particular, I found out through LinkedIn’s home page that Kate Brigham had joined PatientsLikeMe. That alone was worth the minimal investment. Combing through others’ contacts to find old contacts is also a worthwhile task.

It seems that the possibilities for LinkedIn aren’t even being touched. I mean, right now it is essentially a hyperlinked address book. Things like the new Questions feature are promising. You would think it would have been more prominent in my job search a few months ago. Every once in a while, I see some UX positions listed from my “network”, but everything’s pretty much on the West coast.

That said, I get the feeling that LinkedIn is in it’s infancy and it is going to keep adding more useful functionality.

Del.icio.us

Ah, the site the Del.icio.us Lesson was named for. Tons of personal value here. I use a lot of different browsers and a couple computers. Saving links to Del.icio.us ensures I’ll have them on whatever machine or browser I happen to be on.

I rarely use the network value, but sometimes it can be interesting. For example, it allows you to see who saves your own posts so you can get a better idea about other sites that they find helpful.

YouTube

YouTube can have a HUGE personal benefit if you share a lot of your own videos. I’ve only posted a few, so I don’t utilize it quite that much. But I do also use my account to save excellent live performances (like this) that I want to make sure I can easily find later.

And now, here are the two sites not yet in my blog footer—meaning… I simply haven’t found a specific use for them.

Facebook

It’s all the rage. It seems to be all some people (Kawasaki, for example) can talk about right now. I’ve even signed up. Like, less than a month ago. And let me tell you what—I pretty much have no idea why I should use it. It really is just a collection of the same activities that I do elsewhere. I mean, as a blogger, do I need Facebook?

What is the only thing I’ve really done with Facebook? I’ve added a few apps to my profile. I’ve added the Twitter app, last.fm app, Flickr app (though I can’t get the damn thing to work right)… but I link to all of those profiles from my blog footer, too.

Facebook wants me to update my status. I already do that with Twitter. Worst part is that Facebook wants me to go to the site to update everything… and read everything. Sorry, no RSS. Sorry, but I really don’t go to websites anymore. (Also wish LinkedIn provided updates to your contacts via RSS, for the record.)

Facebook also feels anti-open, anti-standard, etc. For example, I have no idea how I would even link you to my profile. Could it really be “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=544839151″? They can’t do any better than that? How about Facebook.com/adarowski? No? Why not?

As you can see, I’m underwhelmed. About all it is good for is the groups features (which I don’t even use because there is no RSS… so maybe it’s not all that good) and the last.fm widget rocks if I’m on a machine that doesn’t have my music or the last.fm app installed. As of now, I can only envision using it if it somehow crushes LinkedIn and becomes the #1 site for business networking.

Pownce

Pownce is a really cool technology that some compare to Twitter. As Brian points out, they should not. I simply haven’t been able to use it for anything because it seems that where it differs from Twitter is that it is great for small working groups. For example, if we didn’t use Skype at work, Pownce would be a great option. But we don’t, so I don’t use it.

I’m not saying it is bad. In fact, it is quite attractive and well done. I just don’t have a use for it yet. If it had beat Twitter to the streets, we’d all be using Pownce. But it didn’t, so it needs that extra use for people to adopt it.

So there you have it.

Those are the social networking apps I use. As you can see, I’m not much for the networking part, go figure. Gimme value immediately and you’ll suck me in.