Microblogging and Social networks

Well after this week I have been looking hard at where all of my knowledge is going in the world. I find it that there are some major issues with new micro-blogging social networks. In this article I am going to point out the good and the bad from all of the major services I am currently using.

People want to get away from twitter because it has this little issue call users using it really heavily. The system then gets over loaded and breaks, the scale whale fills the twitter web page and all of the errors appear. Complaining people start bad mouthing twitter and start looking for the next best thing.

I started out my micro-blogging with jaiku, www.jaiku.com. There didn't seem to be many friends there and I was having problems finding people that I knew. This is one of the big issues with being an early adopter. Jaiku is nice in the way it sets up the conversitions that people have. They are placed into a thread so you don't have to search through many other messages to follow the conversation. The mobile version looks like the web version with little differences. Jaiku also has a few programmers that have made apps to allow you to post and recieve messages from Jaiku. These apps are a little harder to find now that Google has bought Jaiku and taken it under its wings.

My second micro-bloggin adventure was then twitter. Twitter for me also started out slowly and I found not many of my friends were using twitter. It took almost a year for my friends to start using twitter. I found twitter was not useful until about 20 people were following me. That is 20 real people not to be confused by the robotic auto adding people that exist on twitter. The development community and support community is really backing twitter. In the last month even when I complain about something not working twitter users suprise me by pointing my to things that fix my problems. Most of the people I am following are now these apps that are question answering or support groups. They have make links into the twittervers and when someone knows the answer to your issue your fix is twittered to you. This has not happened on any of the other services I am currently using.

The rest of my micro-blogging areas are plurk, brightkite, ping.fm, and the newest kid on the block Identi.ca. For me plurk and brightkite both have some cool features that make them nice. Plurk gives you a Karma rating that lets you know how social you are. This Karma rating can be picky if you don't post to plurk for a day or so, which can bring down your ratings.

Brightkite integrates with google maps showing you where all of your friends are and what is going on in your area. I once again live in an area where there are little to no brightkite users so I can't find anyone to meetup with. Even when looking for people to just run into when at Hershey Park. I guess geeks don't get out and have fun much.

Ping.fm lets you post to most of your blog and micro-blog sights, update your status on your social networking sights. I have found this a wonderful tool.

Identi.ca the new kid on the block labeled a Twitter Clone, does 90% of what twitter already does. Nothing new there. I think it even got the breaking part down, the first day I tried it the support email didn't work, and I could signup for the service, but I could not login and make changes to my account settings. The major push for the Identi.ca service is that it is Open Source. I don't find this a big deal to jump on this service. All services have APIs that you can create apps for and you are not tied into having to go to that services website. If the openness of this service makes it a more distrubtied service so the service becomes more reliable, but time will only tell.

Hope to twitter, jaiku, plurk, bkite, Identica, or ping you all soon.