Social networking and splicing everything together

As people may know, I’m a big fan of many of the so-called Web 2.0 technologies (although less of a fan of the term itself). I’ve been blogging since 2001, and like to at least create an account on anything new that comes along, just to see if it can add anything to my online life.

I’ve been exploring Twitter today, and while it seems fun, I’m not sure it does that much that existing things I use can’t do. That said, it did give me the chance to interact with two services that don’t seem that well know as yet (to the point where I have my first name as a username on both) , but which I find very useful.

Firstly there is onXiam which simply creates a profile page detailing all the various online services I use, and what my username is in case people want to add me (or in case I forget what I’ve signed up to).

And then there is Mugshot, which is a Red Hat devised social networking site which I generally use to spice together RSS feeds from LJ, Facebook, LastFM and about 20 news based websites. I don’t use it for social activities, but it does act as an intelligent feed aggregator and a way of keeping up with the news.

In theory, this blog post should aggregate to Mugshot, which should then in turn feed through to Facebook, thus informing pretty much everyone I interact with online that I have something of vague interest to say. Of course, this wouldn’t be required if I’d made any effort to add everyone I know to every site I use and not just one or two, but until I get organised I think this is the best form of “mass broadcast” available.