jeremy snyder’s meta|remix

as i mentioned before, i started using twitter a while ago. but i’m really unimpressed with it. i see a mix of people using it, and for different purposes.

1. those who just have conversations with each other, where every tweet begins with @johndoe
2. those who just use it to push their own services, where every tweet has a tinyurl.com, ow.ly, ping.fm or is.gd link in it
3. those who use it like a digg substitute, with a url as above in it
4. those whose tweets are really what the site was intended for, just personal updates.

so far, i’m not finding too much value in any of those. i hear that you get a lot of breaking news first on twitter, but that’s not a key need for me too often.

and by the way, i always heard the story that twitter started as an offshoot of another company, with the core question being a way to tell people what you’re doing right now, which was observed through people’s status updates in their instant messengers. so why can’t my twitter updates actually update my instant messenger status? i have yet to see a tool that updates my status in skype, adium, pidgin, trillian, aim, etc.

i’ve heard a lot of the hype around friendfeed, both on the positive side (quick, easy, great for keeping informed) and negative (overload, overkill, too much information). my very quick initial feedback.

• getting started was easy
• sign-up was simple and quick
• getting my first 5 services installed was also painless
• it couldn’t find my webmail contacts, except for gmail
• only 4 of my gmail contacts use it

so bottom line: without the necessary “critical mass” of my friends using it, i’ll leave it alone.

i just installed this ping.fm plugin, after reading this discussion. i’ve tried posting some stuff, but it’s not quite working out yet. let me see if i can figure that out. you should be able to see updates in the sidebar soon.