SocialOnTheWeb

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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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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