Time-saving apps and tools
Social networks are great. However, your “friends” may be scattered over different networks such as Facebook, Netlog, Myspace or Twitter. Fortunately, there are good tools for monitoring all your online friends efficiently.
You can enhance your Facebook page by means of various Facebook Apps (http://www.facebook.com/apps). Among the thousands of (useless) games, there are a couple of useful tools as well. For instance, you can use Friend Me Up to place a link to your Twitter and LinkedIn profiles on your Facebook page. LinkedInContacts allows you to check whether your LinkedIn friends also have a Facebook account. And SocialTwitter lets you update your Facebook and Twitter status simultaneously.
Overall update
Updating all your networks in one go is the speciality of Ping.fm (http://www.ping.fm). It allows you to post messages on 49 different networks simultaneously, or on a limited selection. You can send messages via the website or your smartphone, or by SMS, e-mail or instant messenger.
Do you want other options? New applications are constantly added to the site, so check it out regularly. PingFire (http://www.pingfire.us) is an example of a useful tool for sending messages from within Firefox. Ping.fm currently only posts status updates and blog messages, but they’re working very hard to make uploading photos and videos possible as well.
Updating as well as monitoring
If you not only wish to update all your own networks but also to monitor your friends’ updates as well, Minggl (http://www.minggl.com) is what you need. This software adds an extra toolbar to Internet Explorer or Firefox which allows you to monitor all your networks at a glance via the “Stream”. This is a browser sidebar which shows all your friends’ status updates and tweets as well as e-mails. It also allows you to send updates and messages yourself. To do so, you have an address book at your disposal which lists all your friends, whatever their network. Minggl also has a couple of minor drawbacks, though. For instance, it takes away some space in your browser window, whilst we don’t feel that the “stream” is refreshed frequently enough.
Who’s where?
If you have no idea which networks your friends are using, use Spokeo (http://www.spokeo.com). On the basis of your address books in Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo!, this service scans more than 40 networks.
Unfortunately, the function for importing your Netlog, Facebook or Twitter friends appeared not to work properly, which is a shame for a fee-based service. There’s no way you can update your own profiles either. The premium version of Spokeo costs $14.95 (about £8.70) per quarter, but in return it monitors the activities of all your contacts. The free version of Spokeo does so only for a couple of contacts.
| Myspace | Netlog | ||||
| FriendMeUp | x | x | x | ||
| LinkedInContacts | x | x | |||
| SocialTwitter | x | x | |||
| Ping.fm | x | x | x | x | |
| Minggl | x | x | x | x | |
| Spokeo | x | x | x | x | x |
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