Post to Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr at same time

Take a step back, Robert and re-read what you just said. It sounds like for you, the whole point of adding friends in services like Twitter and even Facebook is to let 'everyone know about something', i.e. to use it as a non-blog means to promote something (a show, a new blog posting, a link you found, an event you'll be at). You're essentially using it as a one-to-many mass messaging tool.

Now granted, nowhere is it written that everyone has to use social media in the same way, but is this really what you set out to do when you signed up? To counter the fact that people are consuming more than blogs and feeds these days and reach them through other channels instead?

I wondered why you felt it necessary to sign up thousands of friends on Facebook the other day and think I understand now. I think the designers of many of these sites didn't have power users like you in mind when they mapped out their features. They probably assume that the majority of users have small groups of friends that they want to keep in touch with or message directly amongst them.

I'm not saying that one use is more legitimate than the other, but is this something you've noticed in your use of these sites?

Joost: if you read this one message and none others on my blog, I can understand how you'd think I was using it ONLY for that. But right now I'm using Twitter to have a conversation with Steve Rubel and a bunch of others.

I definitely am using it for different reasons then they were designed for. Social networks are powerful distributors of information. Over on Twitter I've witnessed news stories being built before they got onto blogs.

The alphabet soup of startups (calling them "web2.0 startups" graces them with a mysterious X factor I do not believe in) is making me a go a little Kaczynski.

That they all sound like patented drugs from another planet, well, that just makes it worse.

You point out that users are so keen to use these new channels that they are copy/pasting, yet seem to miss the main point. I suspect the majority of the population and a good chunk of key opinion makers are not going to get "into" all this stuff until a short list of real non-overlapping winners emerge from the ideas and the rest die off. And who has time to invest in sites that are going to die, unless you're into the scene for its own sake?

I've seen the hack, and where it would work for some folks, it's got it's drawbacks. Some of my posts are service specific.

The main thing keeping me from hoping on the Pownce bandwagon is the lack of an API. At some point they are going to have to open things up. Until then I fear I'm only going to use Pownce to pimp blog posts, etc. All my day to day conversation is still happening over on twitter.

I've been ranting about this for a couple of weeks. The latest is here. 've also been trying the blueswarm.org profile aggregator, which makes some steps toward the goal I'm looking for, except that it goes the wrong way. I want one central profile that I can update, preferably on my own blog website, that automatically feeds to the services I use. Not the other way around.

And adding friends...good grief. I don't have nearly the number of friends that most do, but how many times can I add the same people to different sites and profiles?

What I appreciate about your enthusiasm for these networking sites is your willingness to try them all, frankly. If you keep talking about one or the other, I figure it's worth trying. If you try it and don't mention it again, it's probably a loser.

With that said, I have to say that the Facebook buzz is getting about as tiring as the iPhone buzz. Facebook has a lot of value and I'm not dissing that, but it's not the be-all and end-all either. It's still got a lot of juvenile stuff attached to it -- myspace-type stuff like 'top friends' and other silliness that is just time-wasting. I can't imagine using it as a business card, but that's because my work life spans two separate and unrelated arenas -- one online and one offline.

My offline career contacts would consider me crazy if I invited them to FB -- they're still in the land of thinking that email, message boards and web search is the newest cool thing.

Karoli: you should check my Facebook profile. No "juvenile stuff" on it at all. Facebook is very flexible.

You still need business cards, that's for sure, but I think that in the next month or two you'll start seeing Facebook addresses showing up on lots of business cards. I gotta order mine.

The trend makes me read the same b*sh1t over an over again.

Useless, using expensive resources like my time for reading that someone is picking his nose on twitter, pownce, and so on.

No real value.

I'm using just twitter for saying what I'm doing and the blogs that I have... that's it.

That's enough.

I hate it when these social sites mess with my time for no value what so ever.

Robert,

Couple of things occur to me as I read this post:
Are you essentially using all the social tools to do the same thing, given that you have, as I'm sure most people do, a large overlap of contacts from app to app? This is fine if you can insta-publish to them all with one click, but a moderate pain if that is difficult.

If you, and other power users, are using the tools to do the same thing, how long are you going to tolerate that / bother doing that and, more importantly, do you foresee LinkedBook and TwitSpace happening in the near future?

In the economy that's called hyper-inflation.
See my small cartoon:
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007...

Bye,
Oliver

..was just passing by.. good work