Cleaning House

I’m trying to be more organised (and by extension more productive). As well as the obvious things like task management (I’m not yet back into full GTD mode, but I’m working toward it), I’m also trying to be tidier.

This is manifesting itself in two ways. Firstly my office is a dumping ground for anything and everything, and apart from the path from the door to my chair, and my immediate work area you cannot see the floor or any flat surface. I’ve got a huge amount to sort, but I’m taking those steps.

Secondly I’m looking to eliminate online ‘clutter’. The other day I dropped my Jaiku account as it was worthless to me. Pownce may be next. Inspired by advice from Web Worker Daily I made an effort to reduce my number of inboxes. If it doesn’t fit into e-mail, IM, RSS or Facebook I’m not paying attention to it anymore. Twitter fits into this as I can get updates through RSS, and thanks to their new functionality I’m only notified about certain peoples ‘tweets’ through IM. Twitter also fits nicely into Facebook.

Having increased my RSS load, this9123.entry prompted me to reduce. It made me realise that of my hundreds of unread feeds, and significant proportion were things like Slashdot, Lifehacker and a bunch of gaming sites from the people at Joystiq. More often than not, I’d end up marking them all as read without looking at them. Well no more! I’ve not scrapped every feed that has ‘staff’, but I’ve removed quite a few of them.

Which brings me to a final request. Dear lazyweb, who’s feed should I be watching that I’m not already?

Got to catch them all

I’ve updated my contact details with the (re-added) Twitter, as well as adding Ponce Pownce and Jaiku. If you’re using any of these and want to add me, feel free.

Chewing the fat

After dropping a couple of social networks, then being invited I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, mainly about the value in ‘broadcast’ mechanisms like Twitter and Ponce Pownce. This train of thought lead me into a chat with the-man-that-needs-no-microphone Nik Butler, who is a big fan of social networking (both on- and off-line).

As these sorts of chats are want to do, we did stray quite far from the topic of social networks, but as well as putting the world to rights he did make me appreciate some of the benefits that can be gained from putting the effort into using these sites. This, coupled with the realisation at several points through the day that there were things that I would like to broadcast, but didn’t warrant a full post here has led me to re-register with Twitter.

I’m hesitant to commit to too many networks though – having to maintain a status in Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter and Ponce Pownce is straining. Ideally I’d like to be able to edit one (or any) of them and have the others reflect that. I use Gaim Pidgin because I want my IM in one place¹. I use a feed reader so that I don’t have to go to different places to get content. How long before there is combined client for social networks?

Although I have U-turned with Twitter I stand by my decision to drop MySpace, although my decision had nothing to with class. Quite simply it had almost no value for me in return for maintaining.

¹ Although I had to fire up another application to be able to have the chat with Nik.

Poncing about

Yesterday I dropped two social networking sites from my collection. In a “everything happens for a reason” way I received an invite to Pownce this morning, which I accepted without really thinking about it.

A minor digression – I get that you can’t launch a new brand these days without savaging the English language, and I also get that they’re trying to do a play on the word pounce but no matter how hard I try I keep reading and pronouncing it as ‘ponce’ which is:

…which, for me, ruins the branding.

First impressions matter. In the few hours I’ve been registered Ponce Pownce has been down more than it has been up – or at least every time I’ve tried to access it. I managed to get registered and add the one person I knew who used it, but that is it.

…which for me, ruins the experience.

Seeing as I couldn’t actually use it, and I didn’t really understand (I did say I accepted the invite without thinking) what problem they were trying to solve – apart from taking on Twitter – I started doing some research. Tony Hung has summarised my findings quite succinctly, which reminded me of why I signed up for Twitter in the first place – being able to, er, twitter from my phone or IM.

This, to me, is far more valuable than the prettiest site design in the world. Until Ponce Pownce (or Jaiku) offer both these methods then they’re lagging behind. Sure it would be great if Twitter had sets, and being able to add events and files to Pownce is a nice feature (although events are better served by something like upcoming or meetup). Of these, sets is the only killer feature over Twitter and that’s ruined by being forced to use the website (or their ‘desktop’ client which I can’t use since Adobe’s interpretation of cross platform is as bad as Microsoft’s).