Social Media Quarterly Review: Q1 2009

Talking about social media is boring, but what else do I have? For someone who wonders about the definition and value of productivity in the social applications era, and for someone who claims not to actually do much, my activity stream would make me appear like an active contributor to the world's knowledge. If that's the case, then here's how to follow me around online. The aggregated feed of my shared items (which includes Vimeo Likes, YouTube Favorites, Flickr Favorites, Diggs, Last.fm Loved Tracks, Twitter Favorites, Yahoo! Upcoming events, and Google Reader Shared Items/NetNewsWire Clippings, among a couple of others) is available at http://justagwailo.com/shared with an RSS feed at http://justagwailo.com/shared/feed).

These the social applications that I use regularly these days, many of which are listed on my Elsewhere page, constantly updated with the services that I recall still using.

• Delicious: bookmarks related to work, specifically Drupal-related links, with some diversion into computer-based productivity and promoting the company a bit. On the consumption side, I only look at my network's link.
• Flickr: mostly mobile photos to play around with the iPhones geotagging. Syndicated at justagwailo.com/flickr (to play around with Drupal's functionality, see also the map).
• Twitter: a few times a day, much less frequently than before now that I have a private account, to stay a part of the conversation. I use the account @sillygwailo to post manually, and @justagwailo as a pinging service (mostly Brightkite, see below, but also my blog and other services that post directly, i.e. not via RSS, to Twitter).
• Last.fm: which gets all of my iTunes-played songs and most of my iPhone-played tracks. I play songs too often for it to automatically appear somewhere else without annoyance.
• Flickr to post mostly photos taken from the iPhone. Favorites appear in the shared items feed.

Since Ma.gnolia's demise, I've been using the "native" Drupal bookmarks I created using CCK and Views directly instead of piping them in using FeedAPI.

Since the start of the year, I started using the following a lot more extensively:

• Brightkite;: where's Richard? I check into almost any physical location that I remain at for more than 5 minutes other than my residence. The iPhone native app is top-notch, simple with all necessary, including listing nearby friends, few of which actually use it. Checkins appear in the ephemera Twitter account. The people tracking mentions of my workplace on Twitter must be annoyed by now! Some photos go directly to Brightkite, then to Flickr, then to both this site and the emphera Twitter account.
• All Consuming: to keep track of movies watched and books read, and sometimes beer drunk. Boris is my only contact that still uses the site, part of the Robot Co-op network. Consumed and consuming items appear in my shared items feed.
• Google Reader: switched back to it for personal feeds from NetNewsWire (still used for work feeds, some of which require authentication). Shared items appear in, you guessed it, my shared items feed.
• updating Twitter about any social media is boring, so instead, I use Identi.ca, a relatively obscure place for me to rant about spending too much time at a computer.
• my Tumblr page serves as an experimental spot for me to 'reblog' things. If there were an RSS feed for the Dashboard and an RSS feed for "Likes", you'd see me using it a lot more.

Sites I still use sometimes:

• I keep FriendFeed up-to-date with the various social networking sites I use, and that pipes things in there, but I don't use it much for consumption or interaction. The rare FriendFeed "Like" will appear in my shared items feed.
• GetSatisfaction will get more use in 2009, largely for low-threshold +1s of ideas already submitted.
• LinkedIn is the work/professional connections equivalent of Facebook. I barely use Facebook.

Now that I have big list of social media applications, subsequent quarterly reviews will just highlight the services I pick up and drop, not the ones I continue to use extensively.