Social Networks and Desktop Clients
There seem to be a huge number of social networks around today, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Yahoo! Mash, Orkut, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Flickr, just the few I could remember while writing this. There are probably as many desktop clients and aggregation sites for these services, things designed to make your life easier by putting everything in one place.
One of the more popular ones is FriendFeed, I use this service a bit but not much, I have a widget on the right displaying my feed but as I don't have any friends using the service its a bit limited for someone like me, that's why I liked Socialthing when it came out. Socialthing doesn't require friends to use the service it simply pulls data off existing services and displays it, I used Socialthing for a couple of weeks when it came out but stopped checking the site after that, I guess I just got bored.
I then started using Twhirl, it was a simple desktop application written in Adobe Air that brought together my Twitter feed as well as my FriendFeed, although just my updates so that bit was a bit pointless.
Recently I have started using Digsby, this is more like an IM application and aggregates MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, Google, ICQ, Jabber and Facebook Chat. It also incorporates my Twitter feed as well as my Facebook Updates, it also supports MySpace, the only thing its lacking is FriendFeed support.
I have no idea if I will be using Digsby in a week or not or if I will find something different, for now it seems to do the job.
One final thing I want to get of my chest is how awful MySpace is. I created an account last year, a while after I started using Facebook and I found it so confusing, I can normally pick things up very quickly but this was different. The other thing that really annoyed me was the huge amounts of advertising, there are 3 big ad units on the front page; I was also going to mention how many there were on my profile page but I can't even find a link for that or any links even relating to an account. A disgusting site.