Back in the day, you had an instant messenger program (usually ICQ) and a web browser, and you thought that was all you needed to keep track of your friends. Maybe you had a website that you manually updated, or maybe you gravitated to livejournal (because you could also keep track of everything your friends were writing).
Then another 3 instant messengers come on the scene and after fighting to get a program that will let you use all of them at once (because, while this is no reflection on them personally…your friends have NO standards…ha ha), you give up. You find that trying to update both the website AND livejournal gets really exhausting, and you don’t have enough time to read everyone’s journal entries because you’ve been spending the day reading everyone’s status on Facebook. And dividing your attention between that, three webcomics, everyone’s deviantart account….
Finally, someone introduces you to the downward spiral of Plurk, delicious, twitter, digg…the list goes on. What’s a girl to do? Particularly when she’s trying to raid in Warcrack AND trying to find the time to re-activate her podcast??
Well…I’m working on it. I realized quickly that I really got out of touch with a group of friends that I’ve known for years. Particularly when Robin mentioned that he’d been dragged to a LARP evening and mentioned who-all were there.
Eventually I’ll be back on a Mac and can use Adium or whatever the kids these days are using for IM. Until then, I’m trying to figure out what’s out there for PC. My computer became a dual-monitor setup in the past year, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to get the IM going again.
All the social networking crap? Well, I signed up for FriendFeed, and if nothing else, it gives me a quick & dirty on who says or does what. Essentially, you link in all your stuff like Plurk, delicious, twitter, digg, etc, and it keeps a running stream of what you say & do. If your friends sign up, you get to see their stuff. Because none of my friends use this site (yet?), I’ve set up a bunch of “imaginary” friends (yes, that’s what the site calls ‘em), and have plunked in the social networking junk for a bunch of people I want to keep track of. If they decide to join, all I have to do is have them add me as a friend, and get rid of the “imaginary” entry. Not too shabby, particularly if I want to see if someone is plurking or updating flickr. If I want to comment? I can click the link to go to the appropriate site & respond. Downfall? When you realize that folks are using “LibraryThing” or “Tumblr” or whatever…you wanna be a joiner and play too, damnit!
Ping.fm makes it so I can post to all these stupid social status updater things at once. Yay for syndication.
The last step? RSS feeds for sites that I read often, or would like to read more often. After looking through a bunch of news aggregators, the one I keep coming back to is Google Reader. You can view things by subscription, or you can see things in chronological order. I like the latter. I don’t want to read everything from one site all at once…I’m odd, I guess, and like to mix it up.
To wrap it all in a big bow? You then take all the little widgets that allow you to “blog this” or “tweet this” or “digg this” and stick those in a folder on your browser’s toolbar (or just in a row on the toolbar if you don’t have a ton of other links up there). You see something you like in the reader? You can share it in the reader and it aggregates to friendfeed. You want to digg it? You can. Ping.fm is just a tab away. I don’t need to have Plurk open unless I want to respond to something, use the “think, feel, wonder, etc” tags, or add an emoticon. I can conserve the bulk of my tabs for looking up gear on Wowhead and strats on Wowwiki.
Heh…we’ll see how long this stab at productivity lasts 
Okay…we lost heat a couple of weekends ago. A little investigation showed that our furnace had blown its compressor belt. A little advice from co-workers (both mine & his) and a trip to Crappy Tyre, and we were back in business. Bout time too…it was starting to get chilly in here.
