Micro-blogging is all the rage nowadays, though if you don’t know what it is you might want to check out Twitter Explained for a little tutorial. The default way to handle micro-blogging and updates is to keep refreshing a page in your browser over and over, but since that can be a bit of a pain, having a desktop client to poll for updates is very handy.
A relatively unknown experimental freeware called Subsume provides you with Growl notifications every time your Facebook and MySpace friends update their statuses. When I first started writing for Make Use Of, I covered MoodBlast, which sends out status updates to popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook but this application does the opposite, mainly.
Subsume currently only supports updates from Facebook and MySpace friends. It integrates nicely with Address Book, showing the picture attached for the contact but is optional and you can have Subsume work independently from Address Book. Besides that, every time a computer joins or leaves your network, Subsume will let you know; and can even automatically send out status updates for you on Adium and iChat when you watch something in VLC, Joost, Miro or DVD Player (so your friends know to leave you alone!)
With all the social media sites available to us now, it’s very easy to go into social media overload. There’s no possible way that one can keep up with even 10 sites, let alone the hundreds that are created each month.
In order to keep up with the social media phenomenon, there are numerous aggregation sites & applications popping up on a regular basis. It seems like most people are now using FriendFeed to stay updated with things but what about the other social aggregators out there that are less publicized? Do you use any of them?
I am not a huge user of Facebook these days but nevertheless I have been taking a look at their newly introduced Facebook Chat because Facebook is the only medium in which I can keep in touch with a couple of long distance friends. But since I don’t like the actual Facebook website that much anymore, I was intrigued to find a Pidgin chat plugin which allows you to integrate Facebook Chat directly into the Pidgin Instant Messenger interface - and for me it works more or less smoothly so far.
New media, social media, networking… who cares what its called? The fact is, for better or for worse, I find myself using it more and more these days. Profiles have always been a pain. Who doesn’t get sick of filling in details and interests and photos, but lately having an up-to-the-minute status message seems to be the in-thing.
Networks like Facebook and of course Twitter started it, and now everyone seems to be adding them in. MySpace now has numerous Facebook-like features including the current status message, newsfeeds and applications.
If you’re a social network magician, you’ll know that a big part of these sites is “updating your status”. This can be something profound such as “discovered the meaning of life - 42!” to the more tedious “hey! Just discovered something big and green up my nose!“. But like it or hate it, status messages have become a big part of social networks and now Ping.fm has come along to make updating them a lot easier for you.
To answer the question: What are you doing? Sounds familiar? The eternal question on Facebook or Twitter that is never quite answered. I know of people who constantly change their status messages on MSN messenger. But I can’t even begin to imagine the hassle of logging into ALL my social networks online just to tell the world ‘What I’m doing’.
MoodBlast was recently updated to version 3.0.7. This app just does it all for you. With a mouse-click, it will update all of your statuses on Skype, iChat, Adium, Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce, Jaiku and Facebook. Talk about being efficient!
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