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.

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.

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 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.

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.