What if I Had One Place to Access My Entire Network?
My network is growing every day. I enjoy meeting new people and learning so much I don’t even want to sleep! However, I am having a hard time with the fact that we have access to all these amazing new tools, yet I still click through dozens of sites to connect with people. For each person with whom I interact, I may visit five or six sites in their presence stream each day. I started to make a graphic of this, but it was a big, tangled mess! I know there are sites that aggregate this stream, but I haven’t found one I love.
I have a feeling Jaiku handles all of this, but I will need to test it out. What I would love to see, is a screen with a scrolling widget for each person in my network. I want to see their icon. (I love it when people change their icons frequently too!) I also want to see a scrolling feed of their entire Web presence. I want to see when they update their blog, Twitter, scrabulous turn, and when they reply to other blogs. I want to attribute more personality to each of these people.
I am just discovering people in my network who produce tremendous amounts of valuable content. I’ve been following them for ages, but haven’t linked Tweet to blog to face to publications and presentations. Am I asking too much? I would like to have this scrolling on my screen all day at work. Then I can just glance at people, see what they are up to and click if I’m interested. I remember Scoble posting a site that aggregates all your social networks into one portal. I signed up, and then lost track of it. I can’t find it in del.icio.us, because I have 6 accounts!
January 30th, 2008 at 6:32 am
Was it Flock http://www.flock.com maybe? Do Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/or Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com/ meed your needs? iGoogle might be a contender too!
Good luck finding something that will, hopefully, fill your needs!
January 30th, 2008 at 6:59 am
I found it! I remembered it started with a Z or a J, so I searched the 7000 messages in my in box. http://www.zude.com/index.htm
But I went back in to set it up and it was terrible. It is ugly and obnoxious and doesn’t accomplish what I need.
January 30th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I agree that a tool like this would be fabulous. I am currently using iGoogle, but it is not completely what I am looking for, as I still spend a lot of time moving from site to site it seems and I always seem to miss going to at least one of them. I will be interested to see what you decide on.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Sounds utopian … or maybe it sounds like Facebook/Blackboard. Beware the monolith approach, I know it takes more management but I still think it is the better way in the long run.
And yes, many conversations are missed, but if you think of the network as a river rather than a reservoir, maybe that’s OK.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I still want the river. I want a scroll. I just don’t want to have to go to all these places to see what you are doing. I thought of all this when you had me do that stalker photo. It seemed ridiculous that we’re essentially connected live all day through Twitter, but to grasp the magnitude of what you are accomplishing up there in the frozen north, I have to go to all these places.
http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/
http://education.uregina.ca/index.php?q=faculty.html&type=faculty&uid=45
http://www.facebook.com/people/Alec_Couros/122100204
http://education.uregina.ca/technology/ecmp355/
http://eci831.wikispaces.com/
http://www.elluminate.com/
http://www.adobe.com/products/connect/
http://www.skype.com/
http://tinyurl.com/33h4d3
http://twitter.com/courosa
I’m sure there are plenty more, but I’m exhausted already! LOL!
January 30th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
There is so much that is happening and so many who are doing great work that it is very hard to keep up with it all. There are times that it is overwhelming just trying to remain part of the discussions. I’m not sure that having access to a whole variety of different links would make it any easier to keep up because of the sheer number involved and the time it takes to work with different tools and be part of the discussions.
February 9th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Hey Jen - try this: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/visualizing_social_media_fatigue.php
Cable