Plurk and Twitter have been great fun as have Identi.ca, Kwippy and Pownce. But there’s a new guy on the block, yes another one, with another funny sounding name. Rejaw .

Once again it is too early to tell how successful this new micro-blogging platform will be. It’s up to the community to decide, which is partly why Twitter is still so popular, it has a large community.

But what does Rejaw have the Twitter and Plurk doesn’t. Let’s take a look at some of ReJaw’s features.

Top selling points:

• Real time chat - This is one of it’s top selling points
• Images and movies - Just like in Plurk
  
• Guests - Guests can comment on shouts without having an account
  

Standard functionality

• Permalinks - Just like in Plurk and Twitter
• Shouts and whispers -  Rejaw maxes out at 1000 chars
  
• API
• Follow favorite users
  

Limited functionality

• Find friends - Can only find friends from facebook and gmail
• Desktop app - Currently only available on Mac but is being extended to PC and iPhone

So what makes ReJaw worth your time?

Well Plurk’s revolutionary commenting system increased communication by making it easy to use. Rejaw takes this same idea and allows unregistered guests to comment on your posts. This brings Micro-Blogging to a new level as anonymity comes into play.

The sky’s the limit.

So what do we have here? A Twitter clone with a commenting system and the ability to easily embed Video and Images. Furthermore, the character limit has been increased to 1000 characters.

Despite it’s few shortcomings there is a bright future for this new platform. It’s only a matter of time before the Rejaw API gives birth to intuitive new applications that will challenge Twitter’s prominence.

Follow me on rejaw

So with the launch of TwitterAdder and Twitter Adder for Firefox everyone is in a stir talking about how there is finally an easy way to add friends. What do I think of this new awesome service, um, not so awesome. I feel as if it kind of defeats the purpose of Twitter and if people are looking to it as a launching point for their new account, they will be more likely to bail on Twitter.

First off, for those of you who have seen my own Twitter Adder, let it be known that I am not a hypocrite. My reasoning is that I believe Twitter is a powerful tool for connecting with like minded individuals. This is why my own Twitter Adders only add friends within the industry of your choice. So far I’ve covered 3 industries and 1 age group (which is private to 20SB members).

My favorite pitch when describing Twitter to social media newbies is that it instantly connects you to individuals of similar industries, trains of thought, and locations. If TwitterAdder becomes their premiere source of obtaining friends I believe they will lose interest in Twitter fast as 6 of their new found friends speak a different language and the other 4 never use their account.

Conclusion

I think TwitterPack and TwitterLocal are the best sources for finding new friends. The future of Twitter adders should specialize in specific demographics. I chose my microblogs like my regular blogs, quality over quantity.

The following is a quick flash application i wrote to help people quickly connect to like minded individuals. This is the first version and i will add further functionality later (adding yourself if your not on the list). I obtained these lists from twitterpacks

No passwords or usernames are saved during this process however if you’re concerned, I recommend you switch your password now, use the tool, and then switch it back to your old password.

If the tool does not work please notify me or try again later.

(Note: The app takes awhile to add everyone so you may want to let it run until your status bar says done)

You can find a similar tool by seocracy at http://www.seocracy.com/fun

So what is Plaxo?

Here is my spin on Plaxos own definition …

Plaxo is a lot of things. It’s mostly about synchronizing most of the things that you and your connections do all across the web in a single place without you having to worry about any of it. It’s also about staying in touch with friends, colleagues and family on a daily basis. It’s a place on the web where you can look and see what photos that random guy posted on Picasa, while finding out that Tom blogged about how he just found a ‘one of a kind offer for a sweet vacation’, and seeing that your co-worker changed his status again from ‘working’ to ‘eating’. Now with Pulse, Plaxo has become a fun and efficient way to communicate with all of your friends, family and business contacts.

Now let me set the record straight here and now, I <3 Plaxo. I said it, it’s true. It’s the one social network I feel has really nailed down the most effective means of communications that encourage conversation and minimize useless banter.

Plaxo’s Pulse is broken down into 12 types of content of which 6 can be posted right from within Plaxo (the other 6 are updated via RSS and APIs). The most powerful of these types of content are Messages, Links and Polls. Some of my favorite conversations on Plaxo have been through comments on Polls.

Now what sets Plaxo apart from the rest?

It’s community. In a Poll I posted recently I believe Leanne Watson says it best:

it’s good because the topics are about business but include a personal aspect, if that makes sense? I’ve learnt things and I’ve made some connections that seem like friendships as well. The hard part is maintaining a presence when reality gets very busy.

The truth is that this community seems to be a very honest group of people. It’s no secret that we’re all here to network and promote our services, however we are more likely to work with those we trust. Bob Thomason noted:

We enjoy buying from people we know and trust. I know I do. We buy that way with ‘brick and mortar’ businesses, so, why not here.

Isn’t there spam?

Of course there is, however it is controllable. There is a large portion of the community pushing their Affiliate Links on to Pulse but you can always filter out the annoying ones. To be honest, I’ve filtered out so many of them at this point that my Pulse is pretty jam packed with some quality posts about topics I am quite interested in.

Anything Else?

Actually, ya. Everything I’ve described thus far as solely part of Plaxo’s ‘Pulse’ feature. There is also a centralized rolodex system, calendars, ecards and alot more.

So finally, please check it out and drop me a line.

Everything you need to know about Twitter in as short of a post as possible.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. - From Wikipedia

Commoncraft also has a pretty good explanation of what twitter is on youtube.

Here are some Twinterviews about what people love about twitter.

Who do I follow?

First thing you can do is invite all of your friends through Twitters Find & Follow page. Once that is done you can move on to websites like Who Should I Follow, Twittersearch and Twubble. (More Twitter Search Engines)

There are also lists you can scan through at TwitterPack and Twitterholic as well as some Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter.

It is probably a good idea to view a users Twitter page before you follow them to be sure they aren’t spam.

How do i update?

There are A LOT of ways to update your twitter status. The most obvious (and sometimes most reliable) is the Twitter site itself.

There is also an array of third-party apps to help feed your twitter hunger:

• TwitterFox
• Twhirl
• Twitterrific
• Snitter
• Twitkit

Or you can automate the process with TwitterFeed.

Where else can i put my twitter feed?

You can view your feed in any feed aggregator (Google Reader, FriendFeed, Outlook, etc). Your feed can be accessed at

• http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.rss - Your Feed
• http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/username.rss - Your Friends Feed

as well as by clicking the RSS button at the bottom of your Twitter page.

Another popular thing to do is add your Twitter feed to facebook. Twitter has its own Facebok App or you can just sync your facebook satus with Twitter. I personally chose to use FriendFeed because it was the least intrusive.

What are some cool apps I can use?

Check out the Twitter Fan Wiki Apps Page.

I hope someone found this informative. Please feel free to follow me: @spazcer

As more and more people look for the “easy solution to making money”, they find themselves exploiting affiliate links on their favorite social networking sites. Unfortunately these social networking sites are also yours and my favorite social networking sites. It’s sad to see the fruit of the web rotting in front of my eyes and, unfortunately, there is little I can do about it. CAN-SPAMM laws only protect us from e-mail spam (or try to), but will there be a move to protect your favorite social media site? One can only hope. If the educational fiber of sites like Plaxo, Facebook, etc gets permanently tarnished to the point where you can’t weed out the legitimate from illegitimate posts, then i might have to resort back to books :0 (god forbid).

What kills me is that affiliate marketers that exploit social networks don’t believe they are spammers. Well, I would let that slide if I wasn’t getting links shoved in my face for “Air Conditioners” inside a “Help Zimbabwe” group. Others try and say that the community “will benefit from these products”. Well, honestly, I think the marketer is the only one that benefits from these products and I guarantee you I could find a cheaper, better quality product than whatever your getting paid to promote.

So please keep your spam *cough* I mean affiliate links on your own websites and out of my networks. And, to all of the innocent, none the wiser, social media participants who DO want to purify they’re network groups, don’t be afraid to speak up.

*Note: For all the Plaxo members who have fallen victim to these links all you need to do is click the ‘hide’ button under the users link which you believe to be spam. Hopefully over time the spam will go down and we can clean up our community.

Below is a list of all the social networks I use and what I think about them. At the end I will list my personal favorites and i invite you all to publish links to your own profiles below.

Ziki.com - I like this because it gives me free personal advertising. I think they spend like 10 bucks a month per person. Free being my favorite part

Twitter - This one is cool because by following certain people i keep up to date on trends in the marketplace

BlogCatalog - I use for getting people to both my blog and my company’s blog. Its also a cool place to meet other bloggers,

Digg - I use as my general news service and i follow 1 friend at the moment, hopefully more will develop

LinkedIn - A great professional network. Bad thing about it is there are not alot of communication opportunities between networkers besides a Q&A section

YouTube - Video Uploading site. Could be great for viral marketing but theres so much competition out there its hard

Jyte - Fun community full of free thinking OpenID enabled humans where you make claims about things. Not so good for advertising i guess but i think its addicting

gooruze.com - This site is good for Internet Marketers looking to give back to the community and actually learn. The site is spam free and I would appreciate it if it stayed that way

Wink - this is an interesting site in that it collects all of your social networking profiles into one page and users can search a master database to find all of your pages.

ning - here you can create your own social networks. this could be great for establishing your brand or company is leaders within your industry if you can develop a large enough following.

Facebook - one of the first biggens. It started off for colleges and now can be used by anyone.

Myspace - other than friendster this was probably the first biggen. In my opinion it is too loaded with spam.

MyBlogLog - youll see the widget for this site on a lot of blogs. This site is very similar to BlogCatalog however i don’t think it has as much activity

Orkut - Google’s version of a social network

FriendFeed - this site brings all of your feeds across multiple networks together.

Plaxo - This is an excellent resource to network and share. The site allows you to share links, messages, pics and more. It also displays all of your feeds as a “pulse”.

* My favorites are currently gooruze.com, plaxo, and twitter.

Please comment and add your own favorite networks and/or your profile links

So this site looks interesting. Its a niche specific social networking site where people can ask questions and provide answers to other users posts. If all works accordingly this could be a very resourceful community. If anyone else is one here please check me out at jonbish.gooruze.com.

There’s a small back story to this entry. Ive been working with an open source content management system for my company Magicomm and it eventually came time when we decided we were going to start our own blog. My goal was to use the preexisting framework of the CMS to smoothly integrate the blogging software into the back end of the system. It turns out this was the easy part….

So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.

So ultimately I’m assuming you understand the general format and benefits of a blog. You’ve got your title, author, timestamp, and a post of some sort. Other optional features include keywords, permalinks, comments, and an RSS feed.
Now I want to go into a little more detail about the code side of this and show you where some simple HTML syntax separates the blog from the..um… not-blog.

Rel-tag

First I’ll talk a little about my favorite blogging feature, the ‘rel-tag‘. Rel-tag is basically a keyword that physically sits on your screen as apposed to META keywords which hide in your page’s header. Now when you’re displaying ‘rel-tag’ that relate to a specific post you use the relationship attribute of the anchor tag to define the hypertext as a ‘tag’.

1

<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/tags/great+blog' rel='tag'>great blog</a>

As you can see it it pretty simple to establish a tag. Basically rel-tag is a MicroFormat and what you are doing is declaring that this link is an author-designated keyword for this post. Also note that in the URL of the link I’ve separated the two words with a + sign instead of a space (You could also use %20). You want to try and be sure that your tags relate and are appropriate for your post. Alot of social media aggregators use this information along with specific information in your RSS feed to categorize your post and you can often see your tags displayed on sites such as technorati.com and mybloglog.com.

Permalinks

The second thing I would like to talk about are permalinks which are also often called bookmarks. Permalinks are basically links back to a specific entry that will never change. This makes them ideal for bookmarking which is why it comes as no surprise that the following helps you establish a permalink/bookmark.

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<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/cross_media_is_now_our_life' rel='bookmark'>Cross Media is now our life!</a>

As you can see we once again use the relationship tag to define the Permalink. This is not always necessary however Ive found that certain social media sites use the bookmark relationship to determine if this link is a permalink or not.

RSS

Now last but not least there is the RSS feed. I could go on forever about the different formats and everything you can stuff into a solid feed, but i wont. The only thing i want to mention here is how to make your feed available to social media sites (seems to be the theme here). Basically what you do is use a combination of rel=”alternate” and type=”application/rss+xml” to define a META link to an RSS file.

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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="MagiBlog - RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Magiblog" />

Thats pretty much it. I hope that between the 3 things I’ve showed you and some of the resources ive presented you should have a social media friendly blog thats ready for the masses.