Social networks, that is.
I’ve been playing with a bunch of them lately, signing up for accounts all over the place trying to figure out what I like and what is useful. Here’s a little report on the top four I’m sticking with lately, having discarded several others as useless or annoying.
Since I carry my iPhone everywhere, these conclusions are based in some part on usefulness or capabilities on the phone.
Twitter
It seems like this is the service I use most, and its ubiquitous nature means that all the other services integrate with it in some way.
I enjoy Twitter because it is easy to use, and the limit to message length brings with it a challenge to be pithy and amusing in a succinct way. I enjoy reading Tweets from witty people I don’t know, although it is sometimes difficult to find them. Twitter seems to have pretty good APIs so that other sites interoperate nicely. When it’s working.
Facebook
The major drawback to Facebook is the constant, sometimes annoying poking and prodding of notifications and interaction. It only takes a small list of friends to exponentially spiral out of control with incessant badgering from various applications. I don’t spend much time on Facebook and I feel like I am slighting people if I don’t respond to their various silly requests for virtual plants or animated Muppets or games I have no interest in or time for. Still, Facebook seems to be the place to be, and I have already reconnected with people I knew decades ago. It’s not going to rekindle any old friendships, really, but it is certainly interesting.
I can’t seem to find a way to eliminate some content from my page that I don’t really want — for instance, when some of the, ahem, younger people in my friends list post up questionable pics or profanity-laden commentary. The only option seems to be to remove them as friends completely.
Wish I could put an RSS feed into my Facebook profile so my most recent blog entries could be seen.
My Twitter account automatically updates my Facebook status, which is a bonus when you have multiple networking accounts.
Facebook could be the perfect hub for all these other services but there are still gaps.
Loopt
The killer function of Loopt is the location mechanism. It uses the location services within my phone so I can just tap and update my whereabouts with no fuss or muss. It has privacy features, but only black or white. You can see me or not, there’s no levels to it.
Only friends who are Loopt users can get my updates on their phones, and since it is not a free service on every carrier, I only have one friend which makes it pointless. It doesn’t seem like I will ever have the critical mass of friends necessary to make this useful.
I have added Loopt to my Facebook profile, but it doesn’t have any privacy levels — just on or off. It can’t be set to show different levels of granularity when it comes to my location, so everyone knows exactly where I am.
Brightkite
I think I like this better than Loopt, because it offers different privacy levels. Friends can see my accurate location, while the general public can see a more general location.
It allows me to browse people who are in the area and it is Twitter-like in that I can read messages and follow interesting people.
If BrightKite would release an iPhone app that automatically accesses my phone’s location services, I would definitely dump Loopt. Having to type in an address and search before doing anything is a real drag.
BrightKite also posts my “check-ins” to Twitter, and I can customize what information it includes (meaning I can restrict my exact location when sending it out to the general public).
Conclusion
It seems clear that the one system I use the most is Twitter. It has low overhead requirements as well as low bandwidth requirements in terms of my brain power and time. It has become necessary that any other social apps I use update my Twitter account and each other rather than force me to visit each different app to post updates. Sync is very important to me. What I really want is a single app that allows me to update these various sites, with my automatically discovered location, and lets me upload a photo if I want. I think that I would be comfortable keeping all these various services if they interoperated just a little bit more easily. They each have one feature I like, but none have every feature I want.
Speaking of integration, here’s something on my wish list: I want to have my Twitter feed appear here in the main part of the blog, right in the timeline with the rest of my entries. I have yet to find a way to do this; does anyone know of a way to have Twitter post my tweets using Blogger or Metaweblog APIs?
