This is a incomplete, random list of tools I use with social networks. Not that I know what I am doing quite yet with social networks. It will take a while. I am just an app, software, and addon junky. So I look for software all the time and usually find something. Be sure and add your own in comments. I will probably try all of them.

First, I would like to invite all of you to Social Median, a different sort of network. It works like Digg, because stories can be "clipped" and commented on. It works like FriendFeed because you follow other "News Makers" and has groups. And it’s new and for some reason I can’t stay away.

Keeping Your Social Profiles Current

• Atomkeep – Yesterday I wrote a post about this one. I really like this service. Keep your profile details in one place and update your social networks and resumes from there. It saves time and helps you avoid multiple personality disorder. I still need to fill out my profile though. Anyone who signs up for the beta gets to keep their account for free.

Streaming Your Social Activities

• Friendfeed – The most popular.
• Profilactic – The most adaptible.
• Swurl – Archive and search your activities.
• OnASwarm – Find friends automatically
• Second Brain – Browse through your content with ease.

What’s News

Sometimes news just does not get around that quick. A story may be popular on a niche social site and may have not made it to StumbleUpon or Digg yet. Most social sites have a an upcoming or new submission page and sometimes this page has feeds. If you are in the right place at the right time, you may spot a story. Sometimes, the daily digests from social networks have stories that you can submit to other networks even a day later. What benefit do you get from this? Possible reciprocation. Getting known as a person who finds great stories and more subscribers to your blog.

Firefox Social Tools

• Shareaholic – Choose from multiple sites to submit to.
• StumbleUpon Toolbar – Self explanatory. One of my favorite sites. So I have a dedicated addon.
• TwitterFox – Not as obtrusive as other addons I have tried.
• ShareThis – Another addon that submits to multiple sites.
• Delicious Bookmarks – A necessity. I only use local bookmarks for logins and the like.
• MySocial 24×7 – For FriendFeed. I wish it would autorefresh
• GreaseMonkey Scripts – Only found these less than a year ago. Look around and search. There are a lot there. You will need this addon to use them.
• The sidebar trick – Screw addons. Do it yourself. The example is for the mobile version of Twitter, but this works for a lot of mobile web sites.
• Bookmarklets – No link. I just add all bookmarklets not covered by one of the tools above into one folder on my bookmark toolbar called "Link". This also has the bookmarklets for posting to my blogs and adding links to their blogrolls.

WordPress Social Tools

• Alinks – Install this plugin and link all your references to social networks to your profiles in every post so your readers can find you elsewhere.
• Disqus Comment System – Comment in the network
• FriendFeed Widget – A lifestream widget.
• Sezwho – Another commenting network.
• Twitter Tools – Notify your followers about new posts among other things.
• Profilactic Widget – I added mine manually, but here is a plugin.
• FriendFeed Plugin - Allows reader to comment on your post via FriendFeed.
• ShareThis – Allows readers to social bookmark your posts at multiple sites without cluttering your site up with button.

Desktop Social Tools

• Twirl – I like the ability to tweek the interface for FriendFeed and Twitter.
• TweetDeck - The ultimate Twitter listening tool with panels.
• Alert Thingy – Detects duplicates from Twitter and FriendFeed and gives you one.
• FeedDemon – A feed reader, but throw your network feeds into one folder to see them all at once

Online Social Tools

• HelloTxt – Notify multiple sites from one spot
• SocialPoster – Bookmark at multiple sites and choose dofollow sites, if you want.
• Ping.fm – Update all of your social networks at once.

Your Social Inbox

I have yet to move everything to Gmail. I still use Thunderbird. I learned about filters long ago. With filters, I find all the comments from my blog, all my friend requests, and my daily digests into one folder. In Thunderbird, go to Tools->Message Filters. Instead of typing an example out, I made a screenshot of my filters. I keep coming up with new ones as I go, so it is not complete.

Not Done Yet

Like I said, an incomplete list. What are your favorite tools?

I went back to Darkroom today. I needed only to see the words continuing on the black screen to know that I missed this. I think I actually type faster that I write now. I cheat though and look at the keys as I am typing.

I just opened Darkroom up right in the middle of doing other things and decided I needed to write something. So this post is probably going to be very loose and disconnected but I don’t really care right now. The words need to come out.

I do like writing posts. I do like writing in general. I see it as the icing on the cake. But I also know that I can write and write on this and other blogs but it will really do no good unless I do some of the hidden work.

And for those readers out there who are used to the post a day that I wrote for months, I am sorry that my frequency has slowed down. It’s not slacking. It’s on purpose. I need to get other things done.

The things that I am working on should free up a lot of time for more writing. But they don’t just happen. I have to work on them.

This is one of the reason I spread out into a lot of social networks and am trying to be a dedicated Twitter user. Just to let all of you know that I did not disappear and that there will be posts.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Twitter goes down a lot. From the levels of use Twitter gets, they will either fix it or someone will come along and build something that will take it’s place. It’s inevitable.

It’s #1 at what it does and the only way I stay connected to the internet everywhere I go. I went looking for another possibility for a while but I think I will wait it out and see who is left standing.

I will be investigating feeds, lifestreams, and lifeclusters. I just had to check if lifecluster had been coined yet. Not in the way I have been using it, so I think I am safe.

A lifestream is great. I have a few going right now with a few services. I also have one I am building out of Gregarius. They take all activities from all your blogs and networks and stream them in chronological order.

When I started blogging, I wondered the same thing that I did when I investigated lifestreams. What value is the chronological order? Another question: Is a to-do list a future stream?

I have paged through blogs in chronological order to get an idea of the direction a blog is going, but when I need to actually learn something, I use the search function. The dates do not matter.

A lifestream is linear. It assumes that none of this data is connected in other ways. If I am researching a certain topic for a period of time, my lifestream will show this, but without paging through the past, there is no way to know if I had already been down this trail and found other information of interest.

And this dilemma has been stuck in my head for years. I started with a structured universal category system, similar to the Dewey decimal system. This I would back up with keyword concentration data to determine like content.

Then tags came along as I was working on this along with the Yahoo api for extracting tags. But that still is not very smart. Is soap a cleaning substance or a web technology?

Then I ran into the semantic web, which I thought was the answer. But then I noticed that it did not cover ideas and knowledge. The systems I found mainly identified objects: people, places, and things.

Now I am sort of turning back to a universal tagging structure after seeing technology like Faviki which uses Wikipedia topics as tags. I would seem that Wikipedia would grow to cover all knowledge, therefore the tag base will grow with time and bits and pieces of a lifestream can be grouped into lifeclusters via these.

Of course, not being one to follow only one trail at a time, the whole concept of knowledge organization has traveled back to the idea seed.

As you mindmap a post idea, niche site idea or any idea in general, what if each node were tagged and pulled in data from your lifestream. As you map the idea, the information you have researched in the past starts grouping around each node, so that by the point you’re done with a mind map, all the data you need is there also.

This concept comes from the way I bookmark. I search, scan, evaluate quickly and then tag. I go after quantity, then I start mining specifics.

And after a post is written, if all the research material were available to the reader, the idea would complete a full circuit and branch out into related ideas, just like ideas do in the mind. From the point of view of the mind, a lifestream is very one dimensional.

Well this is where I am at now. Again with the questions. And a post with no real answers. There is no straight lines in nature. Anything that exists on earth has a job ahead of it if it wants to go against what is natural. Streams join and separate and eventually flow into the oceans.

I noticed the other day that my feeds stopped showing my delicious bookmarks. Every they would post automatically but only in the feeds. So I checked delicious.

They changed how they post your bookmarks. Now you can post them to an actual blog post with trackbacks. So by adding your comments to your description, you can create speedlink posts from your bookmarks throughout the day and delicious will post them to your blog whenever you choose. You can choose a specific category to post to if you want. Mine are in "Findings". I’ll have to rename that one.

I had been looking for a WordPress plugin to do this, but this method works even better. Give linklove and get trackbacks.

I have been slowly working my through the free ebooks I have found lately. Right now I am in the middle of Authority Black Book by Jack Humphrey. It is a resource book based on the techniques listed at a post over at SeoFeed. Jack Humprey wrote the ebook Power Linking a few years back when I was just getting started in internet marketing. It was actually a great book for the time on getting links to your site to build traffic. Authority Black Book covers the same territory but from a blogging and web 2.0 aspect.

In the book, Jack mentions that you should bookmark your own posts at as many bookmarking sites that you normally use. I don’t know about you, but I don’t normally use too many. Has bookmarking or submitting my own posts helped. Yes, and I have seen jumps of over 100% more traffic on days that I have picked a good post and submitted to either Stumbleupon or Digg. But this type of traffic is mainly that day only.

Some of these sites, like Delicious or other almost purely bookmarking sites, don’t give you much the initial day, but will give you more long term traffic down the road.

My question is where this crosses over to the spamming side. I have probably submitted 4 posts to a social site myself in the last month or so. About the only site I use normally for bookmarking is Delicious. I guess instead of using Delicious, I could use OnlyWire for everything I bookmark, that way my bookmark will be saved to delicious and 14 other sites. I do bookmark a lot, at least four of five new ones a day. So, I think that is what I will do and test the results. I will through my own links in there too, but a little more often now.

And if any readers have tips or suggestions, drop me a comment. I follow.