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.

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 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.

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.

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.

SocialURL is not the best or the easiest to use of the profile aggregators out there, but it isn’t the worst either.

One suggestion: actually suggest the proper urls to people during the linking process. Suggesting www.delicious.com to link to my del.icio.us page was not very helpful.

Friendster is one of the original social networks. In fact, it has been around so long that I had forgotten that I had created a profile there. I had trouble logging in until I realized that my account predated gmail.

Anyway, it is there and even after editing the profile, it is still dull. It also is so advertising-laden that I think it is pretty hopeless. With so much better choices out there, I don’t know why anyone would Friendster as their primary social network.

When I first found this one, I wasn’t quite sure how WikiYou and PeekYou were different. I also wasn’t thrilled that it was using my old MySpace photograph as I like my latest portrait much better.

A little bit of cleanup, though, and I have an entry that I can live with. I am wondering at this point, though, just how many of these sites there are out there.

WikiYou’s aim is apparently to create a biography of everyone in the whole world. Judging from my initial exploration of the site, they have a long way to go. Since I generally prefer someone who knows something about me to write my bios, I copied and pasted the one from the about page here.

The biggest negative I see is that there appears to be no accountability. Anyone can write something about someone else, good or bad. I also find it odd that while you have the chance to post one custom link, they ask for your myspace page. While I certainly have one, I would think being able to link to the social network of your choice would be more logical. Mashable describes WikiYou as Twitter Plus Wikipedia but I can’t quite figure out why.

According to their website, “Rapleaf’s goal is to make it more profitable to be ethical. Rapleaf is the only email-based reputation lookup on the web. We encourage you to lookup people’s Rapleaf reputation before transacting, hiring, or even interacting with them. We also encourage you to endorse your friends and leave feedback on buyers and sellers.”

I still have some questions: You seem to only be able to add profiles that they auto-detect. The demographic information is not editable (my age is slightly off) but they tell me that is coming soon. I think this site would greatly benefit from OpenID support. But so far, an interesting start, at least.

gleamd seems to often be described as digg for people. That would seem to be a reasonable assessment from what I can tell.

The current most popular are exactly who you would expect to be popular among the web2.0 set. It will be interesting to see if and when this changes and who makes it to the top.

BlueSwarm is yet another lifestreaming site but it has a couple of twists that make it interesting. While it is certainly limited at the moment to a small group of services, it does a great job of importing information from them. With a glance, you can see what people have done at places easier than if you were actually at the sites themselves looking around.

This is definitely another one to watch.

I found out about ProfileFly by finding this article while doing more research on Profilactic. Finding two different sites within minutes of each other made for an interesting experience.

At first glance, I was more impressed with ProfileFly. But after creating an account, I was much less so. The worst part: Listing the sites you can create a profile for and then forcing you to input the entire url for each one. They should really take a look at how some of the other sites make use of the username whenever possible.

I found out about Profilactic when one of my Facebook friends mentioned it over there. And naturally I had to go check it out.

I am beginning to think there are soon going to be as many profile linking sites as there profile sites overall. But I was impressed with how easy this one was to setup. I added over a dozen profiles in under two minutes. Definitely one to watch.

I haven’t done much with Natuba yet. It looks to be a pretty good Lifestreaming app but I haven’t found anything that sets it apart from any of the others.

Definitely something to explore more later.

I decided earlier that I was going to do my best to get a pownce invite today. Fortunately, it turned out not to be that difficult.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with it. Eric Rice has some ideas, fortunately.

ex.plode.us bills itself as “social search” but seemed to be to be another social network site that operates by providing links to other social networks that you may be a member of. Not that original, but any site that supports OpenID is worth exploring. It also has a collections and interests feature but I haven’t quite figured out how that works just yet.

I did find one thing, odd. After providing the site a number of profile links, the search came up with two sites: flickr (which I had already provided) and jaiku (which I hadn’t).

For another perspective, read Ian Thal and the Doppelgängers.

I signed up for iLike a few weeks ago. At first, I thought it was very much like last.fm, and in many ways it really is. What sets it apart, though, is the collaboration the site has with one of my favorite places to find new music, garageband. iLike doesn’t just let you listen to songs and suggest others to buy; it also suggests similar songs you can download for free. That is a feature that I really like.

Jyte is the Web 2.0 site that allows you to make claims and allow other people to judge them? But what if you would prefer people to simply answer a yes or no question? wis.dm is the site for you.

I wonder who will be the first to come up with a multiple-choice site? And I hope that if someone does, like Jyte and unlike wis.dm thus far, they will remember to offer a web feed.

When I read about MyLifeBrand™ on TechCrunch last week, I thought it sounded like an interesting idea. So I applied and got accepted for a membership.

There seems to be a lot there so I will probably be working on my profile for a while.

MyBlogLog is not a lifestreaming app, or at least it isn’t just yet. What it does do is offer a statistics package as well as the ability to create a community around an individual weblog.

I am not sure how useful it would be for me, but I can see that it could be really cool for people looking for that sort of thing.

I found out about Me In One this morning via LifeStream Blog (which just happens to point back over here).

The Cool Thing – OPML Support: Copying and Pasting all the feeds from istalkr made me realize just how useful that would be

The Not-So-Cool Thing – The profile image is pulled from Gravatar which I didn’t have setup with the address and now it never refreshes

The UnCool Thing – The page title only lists the site name, not the page you are on

correlate.us is yet one more lifestream application, as noted . This one seems a little more focused than some competitors because it only offers a select group of services as yet.

It will be interesting to see how this personal project moves forward.

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.

ICQ is one of the original instant messaging services. I don’t remember when I first created my account but I know I have had it for at least a decade.

But it isn’t something I use very much anymore. I just had to clean up the profile data because it was years out of date. So consider this one included just for completeness.

If you are looking for a place to keep track of everything you read, you certainly can’t go wrong by trying our LibraryThing.

Plus you can write reviews and see what other people and do all sorts of Web 2.0-type things. This is a site to watch.

Jyte is all about identity but not in the usual way. What this site does is actually let you make claims. The basic idea is that they are personal but there is also the option of participating in groups.

If you prefer asking questions to making statements, you might rather use wis.dm.

Wink is another of those sites that is trying to become a sort of meta-profile site that links to everything you do everywhere else. It is a cool idea although I wonder how many players in this space are going to survive longterm.

And it could work a little better. Right now it just seems little more ambitious version of onXiam.

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.

Steven Cohen has described iStalkr as Twitter on crack. You will have to decide that for yourself. It certainly isn’t the nicest-looking page.

The question is does it offer any functionality that Tumblr, Ziki or Jaiku does not?

Leo Laporte has decided that Jaiku has everything Twitter has and more. And that along with a certain branding issue has caused him to make the switch.

I am not sure yet. But since I redirected my Tumblr feed over there, everything I post will get picked up there anyway for now.

I created my first Blogger account back in September of 2000. At that time, it seemed like the perfect way to add content to LibraryPlanet.com. Unfortunately, I abandoned that account years ago and had to start over.

Since Google purchased them years ago, there have not been super improvements. But it has proved to be a reliable system and is still not a bad place for the non-technically inclined to start their first weblog.

LinkedIn is a sort of MySpace for grownups. It is a bit harder to make connections within the system, but the idea is those connections are actually valuable (which tends not to be the case with most social networks).

I really haven’t used it for anything yet and I have no current plans to change employers. But it doesn’t hurt to have one more option out there.

There are several sites on the web where you can buy stock icons. But there is only one IconBuffet.

Trading icons around between users was a function from the beginning. These days, though, the site has been transformed into a fully-functional social networking site. While I doubt MySpace has anything to worry about, it does give us a look into just what features business need to be thinking about.

What needs to be said about Slashdot, the granddaddy of all tech news sites?

I have a profile here but I don’t comment very often so this is a pretty static display. But it is still nice to have.

Twitter is a very interesting phenomenon. Is it instant messaging or a blog or a combination of the two or something completely different? Only time will tell.

It certainly is popular right now, though. Whether it will stand the test of time will remain to be scene.

Typekey is the long-running identity service provided by Six Apart, who at the time were best known for the blogging solution, Movable Type. Typekey was their try at creating a solution.

But it was controversial from the start, and has never really gone very far. It does support OpenID, though. It will be interesting to see if it has any growth potential as we move into the future.