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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve only even been a member of LinkedIn since December. I admit that I failed to see the value of something that just lets you “link” to people, without having any metadata involved. Yeah… I’m linked to Chris Messina. So what? Does that mean I’m a fan of Chris? Am I a friend of Chris? Does Chris really know who I am? It’s really tough to tell.

I think I had a grand total of one connection until the news broke of Steve Ganz implementing hResume throughout the site. Brian interviewed him about it. I suddenly got a lot more interested in a networking site that showed an obvious appreciate of advanced Microformats. So, lately I’ve been keeping up with LinkedIn, actively updating a profile and sending/accepting requests for linkage goodness.

Back to Mario and the LinkedIn blog. Corporate blogs are interesting… there are some rules about corporate blogging that discourage talking about your products and becoming too much like brochureware. Like everything, I give this a big fat “depends”.

If Adobe blogged about its products, there may not be much benefit for the user. How often are updates being made to their software? Not really often enough. If you’re just going to blog about how wonderful your products are, then you could be doing more harm than good.

However, if you give someone on the development team at Adobe free reign to blog about the development process, why decisions are being made, tradeoffs, progress updates, etc., you could be onto something. That type of person is a “Community Manager”. A community manager is someone within the company that represents not only the company but the users of the company’s products. The community manager is a customer advocate who listens to customer wishes and demands—and makes good on them. The community manger focuses more on providing a successful product in the eyes of the users than a successful product based on the bottom line.

(Disclaimer: Adobe could even nave one of these… I really haven’t checked.)

A Community Manager could help a large software company, but how much I’m not sure. One guy or gal giving a view into the inner workings of a company is not going to trigger millions of dollars in sales—the type of blip that really gets noticed in these very large companies. But take a service like LinkedIn or any of the many other web apps out there. If a community manager helps bring in a fraction of that revenue, it could mean a huge increase for a smaller company.

Jeremiah has an excellent list of some of his favorite community managers. Jeremiah himself was a community manager at Hitachi Data Systems before becoming a PodTech rock star. The list includes folks such as Guy Kawasaki (one of the first and most well known tech evangelists) and Tara Hunt.

The point of this rambling post is that I’m going to have a chance to take part in community management soon. This has really been a dream of mine. I love designing and developing for the web. But there’s a reason my feed reader “must read” subcategory includes Brian, Tara, Jeremiah, and Chris, and not more traditional design blogs. It’s all about the user—you have to start with the user. How you’re going to pull off CSS rounded corners are just details once your strategy is in place.