two years ago, I wrote about the then discombobulated state of social networking.  Things have improved a bit since then:

• Del.icio.us is still, well, Delicious.   I still find Delicious to be the easiest way to participate in the read/write web- I've tagged close to 1500 items, used it to share stuff, used it to find stuff, used it to remember stuff... in many ways, its the current focal point of my online experience.
• Sharing pictures online is still a mess.  Flickr is cool, but to put it simply, none of my friends use it.  Instead, my friends upload pictures to myspace, facebook, or older photo sites like kodak.  Low-res pictures get emailed around, and eventually disappear.  For a while, I tried to use Windows Live Messenger Shared Folders (thats alot to type..) to share pictures with my mom, but that didn't quite work out. I am still looking for the perfect way to share pictures, and very soon, videos.  Flickr may win by default...
• 43 Things was a cool idea that fizzled.  not sure why.  That's all I have to say about that.

The new hotness (and by new, I of course mean old to everyone except me...), surprisingly, are a series of services that attack social networking from surprisingly different angles.

• Twitter is anti-blogging. It's often referred to as micro-blogging, but I don't think that sums it up quite right- Twitter boils blogging down to its most pure form (answering the question: "what am I doing right now?"), and throws away everything that is horrible and annoying about blogging: trackbacks, linkbacks, comments, spam, tags, clouds, feeds, etc. Some might call it glorified IRC chat, some might call it a conversation bus, some might call it the future- all of them are right.
• I think Facebook is probably best described as the first true social operating system.  See, in geek terms, an "operating system" is the software that provides developers with a layer of abstraction so that they can write applications without worrying about the details of the computer machinery that those apps will run on.  That's exactly what Facebook does, but for the social Internet.  Developers write applications (like, 25k+ at the time of this posting) that run on facebook, and they don't have to worry about all of the nitty gritty details of how to manage communities- Facebook takes care of all of that, and the apps just hum along.  its pretty damn cool- and, to top it off, the abstraction works both ways.  as a user, I don't have to pay attention to dozens of different web sites, accounts, friends lists, etc- i just do that once, in Facebook, and I get a "portal" experience for all the different apps that I'm interested in.  Cool.
  • the other thing that I find interesting about facebook is that it's essentially a walled garden- there is no notion of "public profiles" that just anyone can see.  It's built on the premise of adding technology infrastructure to existing, established social networks- not on the notion of building web-wide social networks out of the ether.
• FriendFeed, quite possibly, is the coolest of the bunch.  FriendFeed takes on the task of aggregating all of the silly little crumbs that we leave across over 30 different social network properties (including every single one thats ever been mentioned on this blog) and coordinates them into a single, global, threaded discussion.  Here is a list of just about everything that chris hollander has contributed to the interwebs, going back to 2005.  gotta love that. :)

So.... what's the point of this blog post? after spending a few months in "Read Only mode", I'm ready to start contributing to the web again.  This is due, in part, to the culmination of social network stuff outlined above, but also due to the alignment of a bunch of awesome tools: Windows Live Writer, Live Gallery, Witty, Live Mesh, and my smartphone... but that's a whole other post.