Social Networking

This seems to have turned into a "chicken blog" of late. So to counteract this impression, here's a few things I've been getting hooked on. Twittering - I've not got a twitter widget feeding into my blogs. Twitter is a kind of linked text messaging system. You create an account and link it to your mobile. You can then follow others and they can follow you. Anything you text to "twitter" will get broadcast to all those who follow you. You can twitter from txt via your mobile, or via the twitter home page on a computer. You can block people and control who gets what to a certain extent, but obviously its not the sort of thing you want to go broadcasting your bank details through. Its a bit like Facebook status

Via the "tweets" of others in my twitter network (mostly people from the OU) I'm getting plugged into quite an number of other things. I already used Netvibes and fed my favourite blogs into my Netvibes home page via widgets. Then I discovered that you can install a Twitter widget into your netvibes page to display your twitter stream. You can also post your "tweets" from here.

Then I discovered an igoogle gadget BeTwittered that does the same thing (all via the tweets of my contacts). A few have been playing around with feeding related twitterings to one place. Somebody suggested having a display by the coffee machine so that when you were getting a coffee, you could look up and see what all the members of your department who used Twitter were doing. X might be at a conference in Turkey, Y might be off home feeling poorly, Z might be in a meeting trying not to doze off.

Next, I followed a link in one of the twitters to http://www.sproutbuilder.com/ . How to build your own widgets that are shareable and contain rich multi-media content. Looks fun so I think I'll have a go.

And so on.... I guess this could be called timewasting, but I'm not so sure. I guess it depends on what you should be doing. As far as I am concerned, I want to keep abreast of the latest social networking developments. I don't have to, but I'd like to because I think there's enormous potential for research out there and if you don't know what's going on, it's easy to miss the boat.