Michael K. Pate

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.

I stumbled across this site and immediately saw it as another entry in the whole online identity/lifestream market. It isn’t the prettiest design, but it does seem to work smoothly.

This is definitely becoming a very crowded field.

I think the real power of finetune is the ability to have their music appear on your own site by embeding their player.

As I evolve this site, I may just have it start playing music right on this page.

Pandora is the first music site I ever tried. And it is still my favorite.

Being able to listen to tracks just like the songs you suggest is a very powerful feature. It is a great way to find new songs and new artists that you would never have found otherwise.

Many years ago, I signed up for an excite account under the name michaelpate. I played with it a couple of times and then didn’t return for month. When I came back, try as I might, I could not figure out the password. So I signed up for a new account as michaelkpate. And I have pretty much always used that username ever since.

I also make it a practice to register it on as many services as possible that I might ever want to use. But if you have a variety of usernames various places (and you want people to know how they interconnect, then onXiam is probably just what you are looking for.