Lately I have started to use Twitter more.  My first try at twitter was unsuccessful as I found it quite useless.  Now however I may have to reconsider.

I used twitter to keep my family up to date when my wife went into labour.  That experience was quite positive and it encouraged me to use twitter more. 

The more I use it the more I like it.  I now follow few people and find that getting updates from their time lines is not as annoying as I thought it would be.  The opposite is the truth.  I know through the people I follow am discovering new links and other cool stuff on the net. 

I also like how you can use twitter just about everywhere.  I use it at home, I use it at work and I even use it on my ipod touch when ever I can find a hotspot. 

I'm pleasantly surprised at twitter and for now will continue to use it regularly.

After a few months of complete absence from facebook I have decided to cancel my account.  Unfortunately facebook does not allow you to completely delete the account but rather they let you deactivate it.  They still keep all of my profile information and everything else I have ever done on facebook (that's just one of the reasons I quit it.  Way to invasive.)

facebook, like all other social networks, is just a temporary fad.  First there was friendster, then came myspace, now facebook *yawn*.  Tomorrow it will be something else.  I'm sure that the vast majority of people who chose to remain on facebook  had or have accounts with the other social networks.  Why?  Every time you sign up for these you need to fill out a long profile, you need to build your network, you need to care enough to participate.  Well I don't. 

So what alternatives are there to facebook?  Well for starters, isn't the entire web one giant social network?  Why use lousy software that someone else made and is making billions off of, and in the process completely invades your privacy (Beacon *cough*)?  Why not have a blog and tell all your friends about it?!  That sure sounds a lot more reasonable to me.  If I want a place that represents my identity on the web, I sure want to have full control over it.  And I want to be the one who is responsible for my privacy! 

So this is goodbye facebook.  I wish you well. 

For a while now I've been thinking about developing something that would track down all of my web accounts and create a mushup of all my web activities. Well, before I had a chance to sit down and write something that does just that the good people at Profilactic have beat me to it.

Their interface is quite easy to figure out. Adding accounts is super easy and the entire process took less than 5 minutes. At the end of that I now have a place that puts my web live together into one RSS feed.

To view my feed just to go my feed page or check out my mashup page

Well just when I said that Facebook is useless, and it doesn't work for me, they go and release a development platform!

My first impression of it is quite positive. There are tons of ready made applications you can add to customize your facebook account, from music, to politics and everything in between. It also comes with an API for developers to develop new applications. This is quite exciting! I may even try to develop something.

Will it change my opinion about the whole social networking thing? I don't know yet but this is a step in a good direction!

I have never understood why people are so obsessed with social networking websites.  To me they have very limited usage.

Take facebook for example. I do have an account, my wife volunteered to create one for me without my approval. I have a few pictures of me there, few links to my websites, I even imported my RSS feed from my religious blog. Now what? Yes, I click on other people's profiles, I even found a few old friends.  However, that is it.

I log in into my account once in a while. Why do I do that?  I don't know. I get poked a lot, and again, I don't quite know why. I wish I could see what the deal is.

I remember in the old days I talked in chat rooms and I found that this form of social networking is a lot more real (and in real time). The interaction is not just by poking but by actually talking with other people. Some social networking do have chat built in but it is not the main focus of the sites. It seems that the new way to socialize over the net is getting further and further away from actual human contact. Something tells me that this is not so good.

I could, of course, be very wrong and some of you may find facebook and the like to be quite wonderful places where you can keep in touch with all your friends. To me it just doesn't work.