I found out about Fantastic Contraption a few months ago and have been totally hooked ever since. It has a really great model that lets you try out the game before you register. If you are like me, the $10 is well worth it.

A few weeks ago, Plurk was really hot for an entire weekend when twitter was struggling to stay up. Unfortunately, and I think Plurk is pretty cool, I really haven’t spent much time going back. Hopefully, Plurk will find a way to make itself more relevant.

Identi.ca sets itself apart from the all the other microblogs by being totally open source in all things in that it is actually powered by Laconica. I am not sure if this one will compete with the others in the long run, but I think that is okay. I think we may all benefit from having this around in the long run.

Everyone should sign up for a Rejaw account, just because it is so darn easy as you can see by reading An OpenID-powered registration system I actually like…. That part is awesome. What isn’t that cool to me is the lack of any sort of web feed. I always like to send my be able to move my posts to a microblog out to the various lifestreaming services. Not being able to do that is not going to make me want to use the site more.

I got an invitation to try out a new microblogging site this morning. I actually wasn’t sure quite how the site worked until after I completed the signup process. I think it has something going for it among big gchat and yahoo! chat users… but I am not either. The ability to pull in friends from twitter was a nice feature, though; that instantly gave me some to work with.

When you consider Dipity as a lifestreaming app, it is kind of cool but not necessarily a standout in this already pretty crowded field. Where Dipity truly stands out is the fact that it can be used to build timelines on any topic that you can think of and many of them have already been created. Using lifestreaming as a building block to get the rest of the site in motion would seem to me to be a pretty brilliant stragegy. To learn more about what they are thinking, listen to the Dipity Dukes episode of Net@Night.

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.