What are you doing?

That sentence is starting to annoy me, every single website I join asks me what I'm doing, why on earth do they care?

Why can't they all just sync their status with facebook or twitter? Well, very few do but the majority just have their own field with no way of synchronising it with any other site.

As I've said before, the least thing the web needs today is another place to store your data and no site out there that aims at gathering all your information in one place does just that.

Every website that promises to "put all your social networks in one place" or "centralises your on-line identity", they all end up adding at least one thing: the net work part; they all ask you to add friends...

While I was thinking of this problem, I did come up with a solution that doesn't involve making friends to share things with your friends without having to make different friends... as a matter of fact, it even helps organize your contacts from the different places.

I might go for it one day, but I'm still working on Deskiyo and it's still interesting. So this is just a thought.

The social web

I've been posting for a while about Connectiyo, which, basically, was supposed to be a social networking website and because of that, I've be abstaining from using many websites because I didn't want to make them grow and later compete against them.

Just recently, I abandoned Connectiyo so I'm starting to use a lot of websites that I didn't before.

And my fears were true: Things are messed up!

There are so many websites that do so many things, and the annoying thing is that it's hard to get them all to work together.

You'll say "There are websites like Plaxo and Mugshot that try to put everything together", that's right, they try to do that, but it's still not working; you still have your pictures scattered over flickr, facebook, and picasa, you still have your blogs posts scattered over blogger and facebook, you status is still hard to sync for every website you use has its own "What are you doing?" field and only few allow synchronising with other websites, and you still have your chat contacts scattered over yaho, msn, and gtalk.

Someone must do something about this, and one thing I'm sure of is that that someone is not going to be me; I don't want to create a website that'll end up to be another website to be merged with others rather than one that merges them all.

Deep Linking in Flex

Two weeks back I was looking for a Flex-based social network when I found Doof and I couldn't help but notice that the address in address bar changes as I switch between the different states of the site.

I asked at #flex and googled a bit and found that it's using something called deep linking to do that, here's the article I read.

After reading that article I thought that it's too hard to do that every time so to day I created a class to make life easier, you can find it on my website.

Have fun :)

Why the apps?

One of the reasons I hate Facebook is its apps, they make it so hard to use, adds unnecessary functionality, and gives you annoying notices about people inviting you to use their apps.

Recently, Friendster (which is the only social network website I use right now) added apps, fine, they didn't have invitations or anything, I just ignored them, I didn't add any applications, until ,a few days back, I started receiving app invitations from Friendster, I was so pissed, and so disappointed.

I just don't get it, these are supposed to be social networking websites, not online operating systems.

Orkut

Just yesterday I created an orkut account.
I have an account on Friendster because all my friends from the Philippine School Muscat have accounts there, but I didn't bother creating an orkut account because most of them are from India, Pakistan, and Brazil, or at least that's what I thought.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not racist, it's just that I don't know much people from those countries.
Surprisingly, I found a lot of my friends from the Philippine School, they even have a community :-/
Not only that, but they even have this thing called "Scrapbook", it's like comments but more like a chat, people reply to that really quickly.
In conclusion, there is more to social networking than Friendster :P