Photo by Matt Rife.

I like the idea of social networking (heck, I’m building a spatially-enabled social networking app), but am still struggling with the idea of managing multiple social networks at the same time. I mean who uses only Facebook? And the complexity grows even more when you start to consider all of the other web apps that you use to manage your life (Flickr is a big one for me).

So when I heard about Ping.fm, I must admit I was intrigued. Ping.fm looks to make all of your social networks manageable by allowing you to update all of them through a single toolset. Makes sense, huh?

So I started to integrate all of my social networks into Ping.fm, but quickly had to make some decisions about what kind of content (status updates, micro-blogging, pictures, location updates, blog posts, etc.) I wanted to send to each individual system. So here is what I settled on:

• Status updates (“I’m feeling sad, but happy.”, “About to take the dogs on another adventure.”, etc.) go to most of the apps. This includes Facebook, Brightkite, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. Notice I didn’t list Twitter. There’s a reason for that.
• Micro-blogging (“Really interesting read at nateirwin.net”, “Why does ESRI suck so bad?”, etc.) go to Twitter. I’ve decided to make Twitter and FriendFeed my outlets for work-related random thoughts. No reason that I see to post status updates here.
• Pictures go nowhere. I manage all of my photos using completely separate tools and want to keep them separate from the rest of this stuff. That said, there is definitely a need for the ability to put random pictures on the web. I’ll need to think about this more.
• Location updates go to all systems that support them just because I think it is really cool to let others know where I am.
• Blog posts also go nowhere. I will continue to post directly to my blog here (and one that is about to get started over at http://nispatial.com), and don’t want to “muddy the waters” of my social networks with professional blog posts. As for personal blog posts, I have a private area that I share with my friends, but am not really interested in making those public at this point.

So there it is. My online communication plan laid out for all to see. I’d be interested in hearing from others who have thought through this.

Yesterday, a bit more than three weeks after our initial public release, we released a new version of whereyougonnabe. In case you missed my earlier posts about whereyougonnabe, I’ll briefly describe the system and what it strives to do:

whereyougonnabe is a web application (it is currently tied to Facebook, but in the near future we’re going to take it outside of the Facebook environment, including a soon-to-be-released mobile-friendly version and integration with other social networking communities) that helps you meet your friends more often. Of course, that’s just the tag line, so I’ll go a bit deeper. Basically you tell our system where/when you are going to be in the future and we then analyze your “activity”, compare it to the “activities” of your friends, and notify you of possible serendipitous moments. whereyougonnabe differentiates between local and global activities, allowing us to filter out some “interactions” while notifying you of “interactions” that we think you’ll find of interest. And, on top of this, we use a granular spatial model to help us identify “interactions” – something that none of our competitors do very well. These things combined allow whereyougonnabe to do some really cool things.

With our initial release, we worked on building a solid foundation to support our core application. It took us about six months to get things to the point where we felt confident about releasing to the public (with a 1.0.0 release). Well, here we are three weeks later and we just released a new version (1.1.0). With this release, we are *finally getting to the point where we can start adding on some cool features (outside of the “core” functionality) that we think will make whereyougonnabe even more useful. Of course, in addition to adding new features, we’ve also enhanced some of the existing features and taken care of quite a few bugs. You can get the full details about this new release at whereyougonnabe’s blog, but I’ll list the highlights here:

• Full support for Safari – this was requested by quite a few of our users, so if you were holding back because you use Safari exclusively, you can now check whereyougonnabe out. We now support both Safari for Mac and Safari for Windows.
• Email notifications for new interactions – what good are new “interactions” that occur between you and your friends if you don’t know about them? Well, we’re taking care of this for you by sending a daily archive of any new interactions to you. Of course, if you don’t have any new interactions we won’t send you an email and you can always opt out of this service. We do, however, encourage you to stay subscribed, as we think that this feature will truly help you meet your friends more often.
• Better Facebook integration – we are now taking advantage of some of the integration points that Facebook gives us access to, including a new profile widget. If you’re currently a user, the widget should show up on your profile the next time you use whereyougonnabe. If you’re not yet a user, the widget will show up on your profile when you add our application and use it for the first time. We are also working on more integration points, including using Facebook’s mini-feed and status features. Look for these features to be pushed out to whereyougonnabe in the very near future (likely by the end of this week).
• Usability improvements – we’ve improved whereyougonnabe’s saved locations feature that allows you to re-use previously created activities. We now do a full-text search on your previously created activities, making it easier to create an activity within our system.
• General bug fixes – we’ve taken care of quite a few bugs, and improved our session handling in general – which we expect will make the system more stable. Some of these fixes will be more evident than others, but all of them should improve the overall experience of using whereyougonnabe.

There’s lots more coming. We’re currently focused on making it easier for whereyougonnabe’s users to create activities, and should have some news on calendar integration (iCal, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook) soon.

Here are some screenshots of the features discussed above:

If you read Peter Batty’s early-October announcement about the formation of Spatial Networking, Inc., you may already know that I’ve been working with him on the development of a spatially-focused application built on the Facebook platform. The project has been super-fun to work on, and, after four months of development on it, we’re finally getting to a release-worthy product.

Well, today Peter announced (and so now I can announce, as well) that he’s going to be giving the first public demo of our application at the Boulder-Denver New Technology Meetup Group next week.

I can’t really go into any detail about what the app does, but I will say that I think we’re breaking new ground in the social networking space. If you have any experience with GIS at all, you know the value that can be added to just about any product or service through the integration of spatial data. Well, our application has the same kind of “value add”.

We’re currently moving towards a very-limited alpha release later this week and then expect to conduct a limited beta test within February. If all things go reasonably well with these releases, we could go live with a public release soon after.

I’ll post more as I’m allowed…