Twitter has become an integral part of both work and play for millions of its users. It’s insanely useful and highly addictive. So addictive, in fact, that psychologists are starting to talk about it as a legitimate problem for some, in the same way they do  World of Warcraft and other online addictions. For smart, rational people like you the chances of becoming obsessed with Twitter (or anything else) are low – but it can be a distraction and hinder productivity. Attention deficit disorder has become epidemic in the 21st century, and Twitter is yet another diversion that feeds the plague.

A colleague recently asked me how to manage Twitter so that it remained useful, but was less of a distraction. “How do I use Twitter productively” is also one of the top questions I am asked when speaking about social networking. I’ll give you the list of recommendations I usually respond with – but note that these are more aimed at personal Twitter users and do not necessarily apply to using Twitter as a business, for example; (more…)

My parents are now on Facebook. Which is cool – it’s probably the best way to share pictures of the kids with them. But the days of it being cool and edgy to engage with social networks is over. It’s just another cog in the wheel now. When your bank and great aunt joined Twitter it stopped being rad and became just about as exciting as a telephone. Not that phones aren’t exciting – but it’s more about what you do with them now that matters. Same with Twitter.

I’m not sure why I wrote the above paragraph. It was supposed to be an introduction to a story about a new service called Web 2.0 Suicide Machine that lets you use API connections to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social network services to lock yourself out of them and delete all your contacts. Commit online social hara-kiri. Pretend that my introductory paragraph gave you a compelling reason to want to do that. Which it doesn’t. (more…)

The Apple iPhone is possibly the most near-perfect mobile phone product I’ve used. But it does lack some features that I feel are key. Some of them would be challenging to implement while others really should be there and I’m confused that they aren’t. That said, the iPhone also gets flack for missing some things that I honestly couldn’t care less about.

The competition is heating up for Apple in the phone space. Most of the touch-phone products that claim to compete with the iPhone are rubbish, but Palm recently unveiled its Pre, complete with new operating system WebOS and implementation of some of the features, like copy and paste, that the iPhone doesn’t have.
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2009 has kicked off with me joining the team at Finweek magazine and Fin24.com covering the technology beat for both the publication and the website.

This week’s issue of Finweek features my first ever cover story, which I am suitably excited about. The article looks at trends in Web2.0, social networking, mobility and communications, attempting to distill the value they hold for business and explore the dynamics of integrating these in the workplace.

I get the feeling that these technologies are reaching a tipping point in South Africa as I notice an increasing amount of people exploring the world outside of Facebook and move into services like Twitter, using them not only for the social side of their lives, but also for business.

Pick up a copy of this week’s Finweek and let me know what you think.

If you’re anything like me you are probably subscribed to multiple social networking services. I personally have Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo Pulse, Pownce, Last.fm, Youtube and LinkedIn accounts that I am active on. For some time I’ve been looking for an application or service that would allow me to somehow interface with all of these, allowing me to post status updates to all, while seeing updates from all of them in one place.

A few weeks ago I posted about Flock – a browser based on the Mozille engine (like Firefox) that mashes up your social networks. Flock does a decent job but still needs lots of work and I found that it was pretty bad with keeping Twitter updated. This, of course, could have more to do with Twitter’s recent server overloads than Flock as such. Nevertheless, while Flock came close, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

I also tried Mugshot from Red Hat – but Mugshot is better at showing other people what you’re up to on all your social networks, not the other way around.

I still need something that allows me to mash-up my friend’s feeds from the various networks, so that I can view them all in one place. I’m hoping that a future release of Flock will answer that requirement.

But for posting to all of my networks what I need is a way to ‘carpet bomb’ them all with my updates.

Enter Ping.fm. This new service collects your credentials for each social network you subscribe to and then allows you to use a range of web applications or your instant messenger to jet out messages to all of them.

Ping.fm is currently in beta testing, but if you write to the developers they will send you a promo code to get you started. I have a code that I will send you if you drop me a mail. If you’re a social networking whore like me then it’s probably worth checking out.