SocialOnTheWeb

Am I really doing this is the first thing going through my mind... Well, yes I suppose I am. As with everything I do in life, I do want to be fair. It seems my post from yesterday annoyed Mr. P. a bit, because I incorrectly called his new site, jaanix, a voting site. Yes, although you do vote for different sites here, that is not the point of the site. The point of the site is to "tune your view of the world".

I have now played with this site for about the past hour and I'm sorry, I still don't get it. Here is the list of topics that you can slide to get more or less of a subject: humor, jaanix, xkcd, social, search, design, google, del.icio.us, weird, youtube, photography, web, blog, math, development, internet, webcomic, comic, tools, language, science, funny, rss, code, news, web2.0, and video. I hope I am not the only one who sees the recurring theme here, but I won't even hold that against the site and will jump head first into the Google category - that shouldn't be hard, right?

Along with being able to slide among the different topics listed, you can also click on any topic, again, I am choosing Google. The first item I am seeing this morning, ironically, is a submission I have recently made. It does have to do with Google, so far so good.

Click on the image to see the full sized screen capture. The first three items, as well as item number six could all fall under the topic "Google". In fact, one is even tagged Yahoo, but as Yahoo and Google are in competition, I will give that the benefit of the doubt and not discount that item. The fourth item on this page is tagged cheerleading, wrestling, and soccer. The fifth item is tagged math, funny, and comic. I do not see where either of these fit in with Google.

I honestly had no intentions of saying anything negative about this site. I just wanted to go back and give it another chance, because Mr. P. seemed to feel that I did not look closely enough at his site. After looking closer at this site, I would not call it a voting site and I most certainly correct myself for saying that it was such a site. I have seen other sites refer to jaanix as a social bookmarking site. I can mostly agree with this description, but I'd like to add that it appears to be a social bookmarking site targeted for teenage boys. Seems that they really like humor and comics here at jaanix. My step son should really enjoy this site!

So that no one is limited to just my opinion on this site, I'd like to offer the following links of other views on jaanix:

• Social Bookmarking with a Twist
• Jaanix.com - Tune the Web
• Jaanix feature - Push to Twitter
• Jaanix is Pandora + Del.icio.us
• Jaanix: A Cool New Microblogging Tool

As you can see by visiting the links above, it seems that my dislike of jaanix is not a popular view. Joe, I sincerely hope you do not take it personal that one woman in her mid 30s does not like your site!

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In January I was busy playing away with the private beta, Lifestrea.ms. Although a great concept, it is a mighty quirky site. In fact, I still haven't figured it out! So, I have searched a bit more at the different aggregators out there, some are in beta, some have become recently released, and some can just be used as an aggregator but probably aren't meant to be!!

Jaiku is currently still in invite beta only. I just checked and I have 10 invites available if anyone is interested. Jaiku is an aggregator that is also a bit Twitter-like and has groups that you can join. The groups look like they could be a great thing that sets Jaiku apart, but from the ones that I had interest in, all that the group consists of is a place where a bunch of people can sign up for an RSS feed of whatever the group creator has chosen. Yes, you can talk within the group, but it was not that common in the areas I was interested in. I even noticed that group creators seemed to have 'spammed' the good ideas of what could be groups by including their irrelevant RSS feeds for the members to receive.

Tumblr isn't really a social site aggregator, but can be used as one. From what I've seen, I believe that Tumblr is supposed to be like a blogging platform, but you can plug in up to 5 different feeds (without having to bend over backwards for the Tumblr Gods). For blogging, there is no place to leave comments, so this is good if you just want people to be able to follow whatever topic you are covering. Of course, my topic is me!

And the last one I will talk about today is FriendFeed which has recently come out of beta and is my favorite social feed aggregator at this time. (You know a woman always has the right to change her mind later! ) Among the many different reasons to love FriendFeed is that you can add feeds directly from 27 different sites, plus your own RSS feeds from your blogs. You can go through and add friends the old fashioned way, or, if you are unable to find your friend in FriendFeed, you can make an imaginary account where you can add the feeds you want to track. You can add your imaginary friend's Digg account, Twitter account, and many others and feel as though they are right there with you! This is so you can still keep up without having to send out yet another invitation to your friends who are probably close to having you committed for joining all of these crazy sites! Another neat function of FriendFeed is that you can 'Like' a Tweet, Digg, or post of other users on FriendFeed. You can also leave comments on the various posts. You don't have to be friends with someone to like what they posted or to leave a comment about it. This is truly a social site for social networking.

I know there are several other aggregators out there.... I'd love to hear which ones you like!

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For those of you who follow me on Pownce, you already got a note saying to go and vote for your favorite Web 2.0 sites. For those of you who don't follow me, be sure to head over to CNET's Webware site to cast your votes in 10 different categories! The great part is, if you have more than one favorite, you can submit 3 votes for each category!

Not to give away all of my secrets, but I did vote for Firefox, iGoogle, BlogTalkRadio, Twitter, Wordpress, Mahalo, OpenID, StumbleUpon, and a few others.

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When I was first introduced to Mahalo, I must admit, I was not very ... excited about this idea. A site where people recommend other websites. Yes, there is a protocol, not every site will be accepted. In fact, so far, I've had 4 sites declined by Mahalo. One was because I put it under 'Surfing' and I was thinking web surfing, not water surfing! If there are more ads than content, the site will not be accepted. If there is not a clear way to get a hold of the website owner, it will not be accepted. This is a search engine providing quality results. Sometimes, especially when writing that research paper, we only want the quality results. Sometimes, we don't and we can continue on with Google or your favorite search engine.

A couple of months ago, Mahalo introduced Mahalo Follow. Although I did check it out when it first came out, I was not swayed to download it until about a month ago. Since downloading Mahalo Follow, I have found that it is simply something I cannot live without. You must know that it has to be good if a social junkie like myself is all excited about it!

When you find a page you would like to recommend to Mahalo, you simply click the Yes button on the tool bar and a screen will pop up for you to enter the search term that would be used to find such a page. Start typing and it will give you suggestions. Next you want to enter your tags separated by commas. Only drawback here, make sure you also keep them to one word tags or your del.icio.us bookmarks will become a mess! Enter a brief description or what you would like to use to share this link with everyone.

It is this next part that makes this tool bar the greatest tool bar ever! You then have the power to send this link and your brief description to up to 10 different social sites! The sites currently accessible are Twitter, Jaiku, Faves, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Pownce, or your Tumblr blog.

Well, to get these links, I just signed up for Tumblr!  :)  I tried Jaiku, but it still isn't out of invites only.  I guess I didn't realize what Tumblr was, because I had no idea it could take everything like this!  I'm looking forward to playing with this one, but that will have to be another day...

Hope everyone has a GREAT Monday!

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I am hoping that with the previous post, everyone realizes this is a play on the new phrase 'social networking'. I've had a lot more people pass through here since my last post, so I just thought I should clarify...

I had planned on getting this written over the weekend, but as I'm sure many who may also have a full-time job that isn't blogging as well as a full-time family might realize - sometimes life gets in the way of things we want to do! The delay did allow me some time to do some thinking about what I would write next. In fact, I almost gave up sleep last night to get started, but my body overruled me on that idea!

My next bit of personal history in what could be called social networking is truly rather comical, but at the time was absolutely mortifying. To give some history leading up to this experience, I had already joined 43 Things and had even started my first blog on Yahoo 360. I did have a link to my Yahoo 360, but after searching for the photo below, I decided to remove it. My contacts on my Yahoo 360 page are friends that I went to high school with and we all have a very warped sense of humor.

So we have all gotten those email jokes that people forward around. Sometimes it may even be an informational email about someone's life or a virus alert. If you ever receive an email like this from me, you will see that I will usually send it to myself and then blind copy others into the email. The looping image shown above is exactly why I now follow this protocol. I had sent out an email with this image because I found it so very humorous! My mother replied - to everyone - "Now that is what I call getting b*tch slapped!"

The moral of this story is if you are one who sends out group emails, be 100% certain that you are prepared for any consequences that may arise with people having access to your other contacts.  If you are not careful, it could put you into a social networking disaster!

I have now covered two of the original social networking tools: chat and email.  The third and final part of my social networking history will deal with forums.

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