Michael K. Pate

Mark Krynsky is excited about the potential of NoseRub . I don’t disagree, but I think it is creating a market problem as I am not sure whether Identoo or NoseRub is the proper name for the service at this point.

The site is also displaying a number of errors as of this writing and several service feeds I tried to enter failed. I am sure those are just momentary errors, though, and I will revisit this paragraph a little later. And I can’t be too down on any service that supports OpenID.

liveZuu is not the easiest service to figure out. I managed to get some networks added but I am not sure why it only shows everything in the tiny little box down at the bottom of the page.

I do like the custom design stuff, though. This one could be interesting.

I first found out about FriendFeed through the Facebook application. It works pretty snazzy there. The site works well enough but the page it generates is kind of plain for my tastes. I have a feeling this service has generated the right kind of buzz to be around awhile.

And part of that buzz can be found in this episode of Net @ Night.

I have been a heavy Bloglines user for the last few years. I had tried Google Reader before but there were several things I was never quite happy with, so I decided to stay with that.

But I have grown a little weary of Bloglines eternal beta test period for the new version. And it seemed like a good time to try something new again. Whether or not this will last, we will all have to just wait and see.

I signed up with My Opera because I was interesting in testing out the new Opera Link feature with the Mini Opera Beta that I loaded on my cellphone. But once I noticed that it was actually a true blue social network, I couldn’t resist completing it.

I will have to write about the rest of my experience after I get a chance to try it out.

I found out about intuuch through pownce via a message about their new facebook app.

Right now, it is still pretty basic with a very twitter-style ui. But I think the basic clean look works pretty well for what they are doing. It will be interesting if another lifestreaming site can gain traction in this already pretty-crowded field.

Plaxo has long had a negative reputation due to their overly-aggressive tactics at acquiring new members in their earlier days. They seem to be working hard to change that.

And they are doing some really innovative things like Open Social Graph. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

I know I am far from the top Desktop Tower Defense player out there, but I still find the game an enjoyable mix of strategy and cunning.

Plus, there is just something about taking out those darn creeps…

Should Do This fits in somewhere in the area of sites like jyte and wis.dm: sort of social responsibility/commentary.

I don’t know how much I will use it, but any site that supports openid deserves some praise.

Spock is yet another one of the growing field of people search engines. Since most people are never going to take the time to edit their own entries the way I did, it really has to rely on the algorithms to put a profile together.

It just came out of beta last week, so it is still early, but I think it still has a way to go to be truly useful.

profileomat was very easy to setup once I figured out how to do it. But that wasn’t easy because getting to where you edit things wasn’t very intuitive. I also was rather surprised at the photo requirements: 185×140 images only.

The biggest issue, though, is how drab the pages is and how much scrolling is involved. I think they have done the hard part. They just need to do the easy stuff now.