Okay – knowem advertises itself as a place where you can check user name availability on more than 350 social networks. If you are the company, you may want to protect your name on those networks… at least on subgroup of them, starting with business, blogging (including micro blogging – twitter eg), communities, information, entertainment… huh – there are more categories of social networks than accounts you can manage… well, of course, if you are not company, but just me or you…

On the other hand, you will hear arguments like Facebook vs MySpace or even Facebook vs Twitter. Personally, I don’t think that Facebook and Twitter come in the same game. Those are very different services and there is no need to be competition between them. What you do on Twitter is very different from what you do on Facebook.

So, what you do? How to know where to be present or not. Essentially, you’ll need to find your own choice of social networks, and to my opinion one won’t cover all of your needs. Even though Facebook’s new privacy settings allow you to efficiently separate private and professional contacts, to my opinion, it is better to use Facebook for personal (private) things and choose another social network for professional networking.

Best I can do for you is to present my own choice of social networks here. From the above text you probably already figured out that I use Facebook for private social networking. Choice there is simple – for us out of the US, Facebook is the place where you will find most of your friends and people you know, since, internationally, it is more popular than MySpace. You will probably have to consider  MySpace if you live in the states. So, it’s obvious choice – Facebook is biggest and with new privacy settings gives you more control than other such services.

Even if you now can separate professional from private contacts using new privacy setting on the Facebook, You’ll probably want to use another service for your professional networking. One reason is that such services are better suited to presenting your CV and professional expertise than Facebook. That is why I still visit LinkedIn and try to keep professional and educational connections there. Choice is, again, simple one – LinkedIn is probably biggest such service if you count professional networking communities – not job listings.

Twitter is another game… Twitter is so called micro blogging service. Bottom line – it’s micro because it allows you to publish messages only up to 140 characters in length or micro-messages unlike classic blogs where you are expected to write more than few sentences on certain topic, although, even that is not nesesary true – some blogs simply link to other articles and bring you nothing but title and excerpt of original text. One of such non-micro-blogging micro-blog is Tweetmeme. No mater how useless its description sounds, it does provide you a value.

But let’s focus back on Twitter. Why should you use Twitter? Is Twitter social networking service or something else? Do You really connect to the friends on Twitter? Or…? Well, that is the question of the perspective… your own. You CAN use Twitter to stay connected to your friends and exchange status messages, party invitations and any other information you think your friends will be interested in. That is if you lock your twitter profile. For some people, this may be exactly what they need and this is only usage of Twitter that may be alternative to Facebook – simply said, if you have your friends and don’t hang and socialize with them by sitting in your own room and typing, but you rather want to know where they are and how to meet them in person.

On the other hand, there is other way to use Twitter, and it is, despite twitter trying to fight it, by far most dominant usine of the Twitter. That is something I call rummor networking to differentiate it from social networking (socializing with people), proffesional networking (connecting with people you work with or have worked with).

So, what rummor networking is? It is simple – You connect to people. not because you know them, but because you are interested in topics they are tweeting about, or you need audience so you can send your own message to the public in a hope someone will be interested in it. And there it is – this is rummor networking – you have something to say, you publish it on twitter, your follower find some value in it, so they retweet it and rummor gets started. You’ll also see lots of web links circling around the twiter – this is another way to answer the question “What Are You Doing Now” – well, you surf the net and think you have found something you want to share with your followers. Of course, Twitter is also a great way to promote your own website or blog. On the top of all that things, Twitter forces you to put your thoughts in 140 character message – it’s great thought-language excercise and game I like more than playing World Of Wordcraft, Counter Strike or other computer games..

So, my choice of social networks is obvious – Facebook for social networking, LinkedIn for proffesional networking and Twitter for rummor netwotking and promotion. Therefore, if you are looking for information related to this blog, or my other blog (RoboCentury), just go and follow me on the twitter – http://twitter.com/gboban , if you think you may know me – try finding me on the Facebook, if you want to make work or proffesional connection, find me on the LinkedIn.

Should You bother yourself with more than those three types of social networks? My answer currently is – no, unless you are looking for some specific nitche like online dating, music sharing etc.

Google wave

Original Article: www.robocentury.com

Google wave is certainly gaining momentum. Most of us already have our Google wave accounts. Although Google describes it as real-time communication and collaboration tool, there is still confusion what Google Wave will really be good for once it matures. And, to my opinion, there are some ways to go and some things that surprisingly lack. And that is not “The Next Generation of The E-mail” paradigm.

What I use it For?

The very first use, I found for the google wave was drafting the documents and researching certain topics. It’s simple – you drop into the wave things straight from the head and than edit, add replies, add attachments as you investigate the topic. Google wave is excellent for that.

Next, I figured out that Google wave may be great for the personal knowledge-base – you simply cut-and-paste into waves everything you know (or have elsewhere) about certain topic. Than you can attach documents that contain valuable information and place summaries into wave itself so you can quickly find what you want and give Google wave more information for later searches. You can copy-and-paste even whole web pages and add URL to the original source – to be sure that you have information even if original page disappears one day.

If you do that regulary, or even better – if you use Google wave as your filesystem on the web – wery soon you will have quite googd personal knowledge base.

But Google doesn’t cite any of those uses… so, lets ask Google what Google wave is good for.

What Google Says: “When To Use Google Wave“

Organizing the events? OK – you can do it on Facebook already. Furthermore, this is certainly not “The Killer App” for the Google wave – nice feature, but it doesn’t make a lot of the difference. Same with sharing photos using Google Wave and interactive games – Facebook is cluttered with things like that and there are many services that do the same. Obviously Google wave is not bringing us anything new here from the users point of view.

What about meeting notes? Well, Google wave is good at that – it allows you to organize and share them with other participants, allows them to add their own comments and so on. But, do you really need Google wave for meeting notes? Maybe – let’s see what else Google wave is offering.

Group projects? Well – this is the part I really believe Google Wave’s future is. But still – even if you can add comments, share ideas and comments, even if you can use waves for brainstorming, there are thing that lack. So, let’s see what else we are going to need in order to make Google wave really useful for group projects.

Google wave and Google docs

You can attach any kind of the document to the wave. But you can’t attach google docs document. OK – you may link to it and share it in google docs. But if those are both Googles own products – doesn’t it make sense for the Google to integrate them in some better way. From my point of view, google docs should be essential part of google wave – the way MS Office works on the top of the Windows. Or, even better – look at the OLE – one should be able to insert any google docs document inside the wave the same way you can insert OLE objects inside the MS Word document.

Moreover, you should be able to create and manage your Google docs documents directly from the Google wave – well, wouldn’t THAT be the killer?

Document Flow

When you create new wave and share it with others, everyone invited to the wave can write, reply add do whatever they want at any point of time. While it is nice for the chat application, collaboration between users may require much more structured way to interact.

Simply said – in some cases you want document to be written by one user, commented and amended by the another and finally approved by the third one. And you want each user to own document (wave) in a certain point of time, meaning only him can work on it, comment it, change its status and so on. He may decide to proceed with the document to yet another user, to return it with comments for additional editing or, even, to archive it and trash it. He may want to forward it for the publication. In some of those cases, you may want that no one can change or comment on the certain wave after it passes all verifications.

This is where we need Document Flow and document flow management. So, we need a way to describe the process and add roles to participants while we are creating new wave.

Well – this counts as “The Killer #Two”.

After almost a decade, I decided to retire Custom StartUp and ScreenTaker. You can still download and use them, but they are not supported any more and will not be updated.

More at: Shareware page