Marktopia

Being a web professional, I felt obligated to participate in one of the microblogging formats and even posted about which one to choose last December.  After tinkering around, I settled on Twitter.  The problem then came on how to stay up to date with Twitter.  I liked Twitterific, but I was disappointed in having to choose between purchasing the product or dealing with ads.  I was then more disappointed in that it kept pinging Twitter and causing problems for me last week.  At that point, I hunted around for a different option and found TwitterFox.

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that provides nearly the same functionality of Twitterific, but in the browser.  This actually ends up working nicer because it automatically starts up when I open the browser and I don’t have to have a separate application on my computer.  You can paste in your current site using the link button, so if you want to spam Twitter with TCW, it makes it very easy.  If you use Twitte, this is a wonderful, free tool to keep up to date on what your friends are doing.

Also, if you want to follow my Twitter feed, you can find it at twitter.com/mizidymizark

Pick of the Week is my way of highlighting cool/new services and software on the web or the Mac. A few Windows applications might sneak in from time to time, but it will be rare. You can find an archive of services and software at http://www.marktopia.net/tag/potw/.

This seems like a few years ago when the IM “wars” were going on. Every other day it seemed that there was a new IM program on the block that was stealing the thunder from the big IM three (MSN, AIM, and Yahoo). To this day, the big 3 are still doing just fine and even a company like Google couldn’t dent it much. This is because once people chose a platform, they were unlikely to switch to a new one but they might sign for an account on it. Until the multichat clients came around, it was common to have 2-3 IM clients running at a given time. Well, I personally am interested in avoiding this problem with micro-blogging.

I now see a new “big 3″ in the micro-blogging taking control, Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. It is early enough in the game that some people havn’t made their final decision, so I am curious about what people are using and why they are using that instead of the others. My goal out of this post is to hopefully gather people onto one platform so they and myself only have one thing to monitor. Some things that would be nice is a client that I can install on my machine that doesn’t cost too much (or anything), isn’t too buggy and is not very resource intensive.

So have at it in the comments, which system do you/would you like to use and why?

Note: I know that Pownce and Jaiku are invite only right now, but as a member of both, I have enough invites to get people going and spreading them around, so don’t have that be an issue for this discussion, please.