Ok, I got it. There are a lot of services out there. And guess what: I don’t even know how more than half of them work not to speak of what there purpose is.

Twitter ★☆☆☆☆

Let’s take Twitter as a famous example. What is the purpose of having people only post short messages with 160 characters? Is it to shut down verbal diarrhea? When it is a tool to let everybody know what you’re doing, I can imagine the following happening between two twitterers that know each other well:

@lilfreak: I’m just doing my homework.
@hotelmom: Yeah, you better, peewee!

Everybody will check for people’s activities. The government might hack the Twitter accounts, log every entry. Burglars know when you go shopping. And worst of all: If Google search engines start indexing this crap, there will be even more SPAM out there. Wanna read something straighforward? How about this solution: Don’t follow some twitter feed – read my blog.

Profile services ★★☆☆☆

Let’s assume you’re desparate in love. Nooo, not with yourself, but with the other gender. What to do? Go outside see some people. Naaaah! Old school – go online dating. One of the first big socializing tools was online dating. As platforms grew everywhere and every single one of them drifts in a direction called porn, there are more subtle ways to present yourself today. Let’s consider Facebook, XING and LinkedIn. They are all suggesting friendly1 contacts, making you look like a professional – and this I mean only positive. And the goal in using these services is to have the most links by so called “friends” to show off.

Journals & Blogs ★★★☆☆

For some people it is not enough to just have their pics online and be linked to 1000 unknown people called friends. They are called MySpacers or Bloggers2. With their own notebook in their hands they cannot be shut up till reported as spammers or violating some terms of the service used. A year ago Google’s bloggers kept to themselves as well as MySpace and Livejournals, now everyone can log in to the other service for commenting. Lord help us, because they are producing a massive amount of SPAM. In March 2008 they even considered each other as spammers, e.g. when MySpace considered every link to Blogger as SPAM.

So do it right and think about what you want to blog about, then get a WordPress blog. Then come back to finkaboutit.com and show off. Because we need quality bloggers to get back at them MySpaceBlogJournalistWannaBes.

Flickr ★★★★☆

One of the first services whose purpose became clear to me, was Flickr. It is a great source for pictures of all kinds, even for people that don’t engage in its social features, but just want to have a place to store and show their pics online. And guess what: Despite its age, this service still is nearly ad-free.

Flickr is also the perfect resource to spice up your blog articles. Photo Dropper is a plugin for WordPress that lets you add Flickr photos to your articles from withing your backend. I used it a while ago for another blog3 and it worked fine.

Bookmarking ★★★★★

What I really find useful are bookmarking services like Delicious. As I have to travel a lot I want to have all the sites I find interesting at my hand. One possibility is to have them stored with a laptop, the even more comfortable way however is to have them stored online. Just login and there you go – all sorted by tags. You can even see how many people have bookmarked the same link as you.

There’s still a lot to do exploring all the other webservices out there. I will try them out for you and report if they are worth your while, right here on my blog.

  1. and partly business [↩]
  2. God, now that I read this I hate myself for calling myself a blogger earlier. [↩]
  3. with WP-version: 2.3 [↩]

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