Well, after a bit of nagging from family and friends, coupled with a bit of curiosity, I've gone social. I'm now part of the Web 2.0 bubble that seems to be all the rage. I have Identi.ca, Facebook, FriendFeed, Last.fm and Ping.fm accounts. Trying to restore Twitter as well (I left Twitter when Identi.ca came online). IRC, Jabber and email wasn't enough to be considered "cool". Now it's "microblogging" and gathering all the possible friends in the universe you can find. Ok, so I'm a bit sarcastic there. I will say that there has been some value in these social apps. I've been able to connect to old friends that I haven't seen or heard of in years, and I've been able to keep in contact with family and friends that have moved out of state. So, there's been some value in it for me.
However, with all these social apps, it's getting difficult to manage them all. Definitely when trying to update statuses to the accounts. So, a single point of entry would be preferred, that could push my status out to each application once. Ping.fm fits the bill. With Ping.fm, I can update my status to Identi.ca, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed with a single message. Because Ping.fm, Identi.ca and FriendFeed all have Jabber bots, I can follow the updates of others through that. Because each service offers sending emails when someone is following my status, or other things, I can pull up the site as needed.
My Jabber client is Bitlbee and runs in Irssi, my IRC client. This way all messaging is managed in a single source. This keeps me from having to go to separate sites in my web browser. The only thing that could improve the setup, is having each of the Jabber bots posting their updates in a MUC room rather than each private messaging me. In fact, if I could join a Jabber MUC that was exclusively built for each bot (an Identi.ca room and a FriendFeed room), that treated posts from those I'm following as a message from that person rather than from the bot, that would be cool.
So, there you have it. I am now a statistic in the Web 2.0 world.
{ 2 } Comments