Social Networking

It’s been a while since I gave an update about my goings on in the social netwoking world.

A while back I posted about Brightkite and Socialthing! so I thought it was time to give a little update on those to begin.

Although I could see the potential and what they were trying to achieve, Brightkite has failed to capture me. If it wasn’t due to the fact it can be tied in with Twitter, I would of used it even less. I don’t really need another micro-blog after all. Anyway, the main attraction to Brightkite for me were it’s location features. Brightkite enabled you to follow friends locations and see which of your friends were close by as well as allowing you to update your location. I found that the drawback of it’s location features are that they will only fulfil their full potential if you have a decent number of users in a local area. Unless you can get all of your friends to join up, there’s not a lot of point really. I think a project like this is quite ambitious for a start-up and might have had more potential with an exiting community like Facebook. I’ll continue to see how Brightkite develops though… Who know’s how it will go?!

I haven’t found Socialthing! to be massively useful for me either, but I have found myself liking it more and more. It seems like they’ve been working hard on the project, with the shift to version 2.0, and we’ve seen quite a few changes and additions in the process. The basis of the application is quite simple. As mentioned in my original blog, it’s a ‘lifestream’ that allows you to view a snap-shot of your own and your friends recent activities on various social sites. That’s the reason why I quite like it… I like the idea of being able to see everything in one place. Again, I’ll keep an eye on this and hopefully more improvements will come soon!

With other site/applications. I’m still pretty much loving Facebook. I seem to be finding it more and more useful, especially as the number of friends I have that use it grows. It’s simplicity and useability remain top drawer. They also have been introducing some improvements recently, showing their commitment to the development of the site. Of course, the main pull for Facebook is the number of useful (or not so useful) appliactions you can add. Applications for other social site like Twitter, Flickr!, Last.fm and Dopplr make it an almost ideal candidate for a centralised social hub (although there is still more potential there). Their decision to open up their API to developers before MySpace was an excellent decison and has only helped them pull away from the competition.