Pibb, from the folks at JanRain up in Portland, Oregon is a hard app to pin down. Is it IM? Is it forums? Is it IRC over the web? Actually, it’s probably all of these and more.

Bearing more than a passing resemblance to the previously covered Tangler, Pibb is a great way to aggregate some of the noise you have going on in your online life. It’s early days yet for the folks at Pibb, and so far they have some interesting stuff going on. Let’s take a look.

You access Pibb using an OpenID. JanRain are also a major provider of OpenID with their myopenid.com portal. Sign-in is simple. You just enter your OpenID from any provider, authenticate, and you’re done. The first screen you encounter is the Dashboard. This is your hub for everything Pibb – access to your profile, a Channel Directory and Search are available, but it’s the tabs you’ll see that are the most important.

On the left of the Dashboard is the list of Channels you’re subscribed to. On the right are your Contacts – the individuals you’re having conversations with.

Channels are like particular forums on more old-school tools. They are a wrapper to all kinds of conversations within that subject. There are currently 854 individual public channels on Pibb.

Not all Channels are active, but there’s sure to be something of interest to find. Supporters of Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul have a channel (the most active on Pibb!) they’re using to co-ordinate some of their activity, social bookmarking site Magnolia is using a channel to provide real-time support and with Pibb parent JanRain being an active supporter and developer of OpenID, there’s a very active channel for that, too. You can join and participate in any open public channel. However, if you or the group you’re associated with want private communication, you can leverage the tools Pibb offers to create your own secure, private channel and use that in favor of other available alternatives such as IM.

You can use Contacts as a way to do web-based IM to your colleagues and friends on Pibb. Messaging a Contact opens a two-way, closed Channel for you to talk in.

JanRain are doing a lot of work to make Pibb accessible and useful for the community. Public Pibb channels have RSS feeds you can subscribe to so you don’t need to live in the application. They have released a WordPress plugin for easy embedding in your blog and, in the corner of any Channel thread is embeddable XHTML for any website. Very handy. There’s also a Pibb-IRC relay bridge built into the application, so channels can be associated with a related IRC channel and the IRC chatter gets automatically fed to the Pibb Channel. Very sweet indeed.

Particularly exciting is the connection that Pibb has made with the BarCamp community. Pibb has been used now as the communication backchannel for several BarCamps, including BarCampBlock in San Francisco and BarCamp Portland. According to JanRain Product Development manager, Kevin Fox, the company would like to see Pibb picked up by conferences and gatherings of all sorts as a communications technology for their events.

I think Pibb shows a lot of promise, and they’re likely to get good uptake through their affiliation with the BarCamp and OpenID movements. Jump on over and take a look.

Here’s one for the coders among us – particularly those of us who design, and code web pages and web apps. XRAY, from the folks at WestCiv (makers of Style Master) is a new in-browser tool for deep examination of the box model in action on any web page.

Released as a browser bookmarklet, XRAY is cross platform and works with any browser supporting the canvas element – currently Firefox on OS X and Windows, Safari on OS X and any WebKit-based browser. I see it as a useful tool for browser render debugging, working alongside critical plugins for web developers such as Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar and the excellent FireBug. One benefit of XRAY is that as a bookmarklet, it’s a lot more lightweight than a browser add-on, and less prone to memory issues such as some people have with other Firefox add-ons.

Let’s take a look at it in action!

Once you click on the bookmarklet XRAY pops up a semitransparent box with some nice, clear instructions about what to do next. From here, XRAY is active, and you can click on any page element to get a detailed and thorough look at what’s going on with that particular element.

Here’s where XRAY comes into its own. Take a look at the next image.

XRAY is taking a deep-inside look at the paragraph on the WWD home page. We can see a bunch of interesting things here:

• how far down from the top and left the parpagraph is
• how tall and wide it is
• what XHTML element it is and any associated id or class
• the tag depth (inheritance) on the page
• all the CSS associated with the element

This is all incredibly useful information when you’re designing or debugging your XHTML – especially if you’re doing standards-based word (aren’t we all? Hmmm?).

To close the XRAY canvas, you simply click on the X in the top-right corner.

Versions of XRAY for IE and Opera are planned. In the meantime, you’re a little stuck with the browsers listed above (they should do you, really). It looks like a useful and simple to use tool to add to the stack of excellent tools already out there for web page coders.

If you’re anything like me, you’re deeply interested in social computing and join pretty much every social network you can snag an invitation for – even if only to check out features and functionality. At the end of the day even with all these memberships, I probably use less than 10 social computing applications with any regularity. Problem is, even with this relatively small number of frequently used applications, I struggle to keep them all coordinated.

In terms of social coordination, there are two core issues:

• keeping your profile current and the same on each network
• making sure that a contact on one network is matched on other networks

I’ve come up with a few coping strategies to deal with social network coordination. They apply equally to both the problems noted above. Let’s take a look at them.

Before you get started, you need to identify the social applications at the center of your online universe. For me, it’s LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter as they’re the places I connect most frequently with my online colleagues and friends. It’s these sites that need to be most up to date. Beyond that, Upcoming, ma.gnolia and del.icio.us feature fairly often and there are occasional others like Last.FM and Flickr.

First, and probably easiest, is parallel replication. Taking this approach, you make sure that any change you feel compelled to make to your profile, or any contact you add is replicated on each of the social computing networks you use regularly. While this can be time consuming, it’s pretty effective, and you rarely forget the apps you use regularly.

In the case of an update to my profile, I start at LinkedIn and then make sure any equivalent information on Facebook and Twitter is also updated. I’ll also update any other site I have time to do. When I add a new contact on LinkedIn, I make sure the same contact is added on Facebook and Twitter, provided they have profiles. If they have profiles on other networks I use, I’ll probably add those as well.

Second, periodic coordination. This approach involves a regular trek through the contacts or profile details you have on your most used social networks and conducting a big-bang update of other sites where the information is less up to date. This method can be nasty, especially where you use one or two networks regularly and others less so.

This approach doesn’t differ all that much from #1, except that you only keep your critical social networks up to date – say your top two – and update others on a regular basis, say once every couple of weeks. The flaw with this approach is the chance that you miss something when updating and your networks end up out of sync.

Third, use another tool to keep track of who’s who and where. I use this strategy in tandem with strategy #1. For me, it’s using the notes, URLs and phone number features of OS X’s Address Book to record the accounts my contacts have on various social computing sites. Any address/contacts application is likely to just as good for this purpose. This is a pretty useful way of keeping track, and it tends to be very focussed on the people you connect with regularly.

I’ve seen other folks use something like a spreadsheet, which works, but strikes me as not terribly efficient.

Last, the ½ strategy. Purge. Mercilessly.

The social computing world is messy and overloaded, and that’s what’s likely to happen to you if you try to keep up with every social network/app you create an account on. About every four weeks, I take a look at my accounts and consider deleting my profile from the sites I don’t use. I can usually find one or two I haven’t used in about eight weeks. That is when I delete the account – I can always get a new one if I really need to.

How do you deal with social coordination overload?

Alongside the sorry tales of iPhones not being activated due to AT&T being overwhelmed by demand, the web worker world has been aflutter this past weekend with news of Pownce, the new social attention app from Megatechtronium (Digg’s Kevin Rose and some of his pals). There’s been a storm of activity as the blog- and Twittersphere came alive with the launch news and people sought invites to the beta.

I’ve checked out Pownce, and while it seems to offer benefits over Twitter and it’s snail’s-pace release cycle, it may not live up to the buzz in the long term. Let’s take a look at a few features.

On the surface, Pownce looks very much like a Twitter clone with the combination of a sexy AJAX-powered browser interface and desktop app not unlike Twitteriffic. The desktop interface is a particularly cool technology implementation, running on Adobe’s AIR platform. Like Twitter, you have the ability to send both public and private messages. One benefit offered by Pownce is that messages are threaded, with the notion of replies built in, rather than evolving as the @someone usage did on Twitter.

Pownce offers the ability to specifically send a link. The link is combined with a small message. This is very similar to the functionality in Twitter that leverages TinyURL and not really a differentiating feature.

File sharing is where Pownce starts differentiating significantly from Twitter. You can send files of any sort, but it’s not immediately apparent just how large those files can be. I’m not sure how often I would do this. There are probably better ways to share files.

The final major feature of Pownce is events. It’s not really apparent how this will work yet and some tests done with friends didn’t reveal any “wow” moments. It does use microformats, so you could probably hook it into a calendar app if you wanted.

The ads on Pownce may annoy people. At present, they seem infrequent and they appear in your general conversation stream. To get rid of them, there’s a US$20/year premium to be paid. A Premium membership also allows you to send files of up to 100Mb. Personally, I don’t think 20 bucks is coming out of my wallet.

While Pownce seems to offer a few benefits over Twitter, it’s really not markedly different and feels more like a bloated version of Twitter (perhaps the Pownce team forgot to read 37signals’ awesome Getting Real). A little competition is likely to get the Twitter folks to lift their game and improve stability (which has been good recently) and tweak functionality.

Pownce is missing two key features for a Web 2.0 app – feeds and an open API. Neither are currently available and make Pownce feel incomplete.

Ultimately, there will be a point where most folks will be either Twitterers or Powncers although there will be a group that use both. I’ve got so much invested in Twitter that I can’t see myself dropping it.

So, which camp are you? Twitter’s bluebird or Pownce’s pussycat? Or neither?

Just as in real estate, location is big news in web apps these days. Today, we’re going to take a quick look at three applications that leverage the power of presence — Upcoming, Plazes, and Dopplr — and see how you might best be able to use them in your daily web worker life.

As we move from local to global, let’s start with Upcoming. Purchased by Yahoo! in October 2005 and now fully integrated into that stable, Upcoming is one of the best web-based event calendars out there. It offers a lot of capability under the hood – microformats, a rich API for you to create your own mashups, discussion groups, contacts, tagging, a mobile interface and geotagging (Yahoo! and Google) to name a few. Oh, there’s also integration with ma.gnolia. Not too shabby.

For me, its best feature is the feed of events you’ve marked that you’re attending. It comes in RSS, Google Calendar and iCal flavors as well as integrating with My Yahoo! I subscribe to my Upcoming events as a calendar in iCal.

Next, there’s Plazes. I’m not sure why this app isn’t more popular – perhaps it’s yet to find its real niche. Almost the Twitter of location apps, Plazes lets you identify where you are and what you’re doing – in a fully geolocated way. As a user, you progressively add to the “plazes” you have been, are at, or are going to, building a history of your location over time. You can also use plazes created by others.

Plazes was recently relaunched with a heap of new features including groups, contacts, tagging and an API for creating those ubiquitous mashups. You can also “plaze” yourself (yes, it’s dorky, but you get used to it) via SMS using a very smart interpretation interface – take my word for it that it’s cool – or using the desktop Plazer tool.

Plazes doesn’t yet appear to have a killer function. I’d like to see it include microformats such as XFN, hCard and geo, as well as the ability to identify when you and someone you know are near to each other – sort of like Dopplr on a local level.

Speaking of Dopplr (WWD review here), it’s the third app we’re going to look at. Dopplr goes global where Upcoming and Plazes are essentially local. That said, it plays very nice with apps like Upcoming (and any other hCal-equipped app), being able to take the calendar information from other sites and embed it in your Dopplr travels. This is a very useful service; one I’ve used several times already.

Like most other social sites, Dopplr has contacts with whom you share your travels, hoping for those Dopplr Moments. They’re also building out a heap of new features including communicating with Dopplr by mobile phone, an API, and recently the ability to import contacts from GMail, Twitter, a local vCard file or using a contact list from a site supporting the HCard/XFN microformats.

Location-based social computing has a way to go before all your apps and contacts know where you’re going to be, when and for what and who you can meet up with when you’re there. But it’s probably not all that far away.

How do you use your location-based social networks?

Former Netscape CEO and now Ning overlord, Marc Andreessen recently posted something of a manifesto with respect to personal productivity. Given productivity is an issue dear to the hearts of WWD readers, I thought we’d take a look at some of Marc’s ideas and see if we couldn’t draw some inspiration from them.

Marc’s first suggestion is to do away with your schedule. While this is a tempting idea, and certainly one we’d all benefit from at times, it’s probably only useful for people with more than a little power in their hands, as demonstrated by Marc’s example of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Marc admits as much in his post.

For everyday web workers, either freelance or employees, we’re often bound to the schedules of our clients. And while it may be tempting at times to not go to the neverending sequence of meetings you can find yourself in, it’s a sure way to lose a client. Web Worker beware! As Marc suggests, only do this one where you can get away with it.

Next, Marc tackles the issue of lists, suggesting you have “three and only three lists: a Todo List, a Watch List, and a Later List.” While this isn’t exactly GTD, it’s certainly a valid way of tackling the “next action” notion of responsibilities and kept simple, on something like 3×5 index cards or a .txt file could absolutely manage your responsibilities in an effective way. The “night before” approach Marc suggests, where you write your next day Todo List before you go to bed is also an effective way of doing a priority review.

Procrastination is an issue we all face, and Marc suggests we approach it in terms of structured procrastination, where rather than doing nothing while you avoid that next nasty piece of work, you get lots of other stuff done – blogging, reading, emails, wireframes, whatever. So long as you’re doing something while you avoid doing the nasty stuff.

Awesome idea, and very, very bursty. Just make sure that you eventually get to the piece of work you’re procrastinating over. Especially if it’s a client deliverable.

Email overload is something we all face. Getting that inbox zero happening is a major challenge and if you’re not careful, you can end up stuck in your inbox rather than actually working. Marc’s suggestion that you deal with email just twice a day is a great idea. Of course, in the real world, it’s not always completely possible. However, if you make your clients and co-workers aware that this is your approach, they will soon learn to deal with your mid-morning and late afternoon mail avalanche as you wipe out the email pile.

Marc is absolutely correct when he says that email is a flow killer. It can be a huge interruption to your ability to actually complete other work. Jumping in and out of email is concentration destructive. Set your email to check just once an hour for new mail (or get really brave and do it manually on your twice a day schedule).

We’ve really only touched lightly on Marc’s ideas, and you should definitely read the whole post and many comments it has drawn. And then, take action and introduce a little productivity heresy of your own! And if you are feeling generous, share them with us.

Still in beta, Dopplr is a very interesting take on connecting travelers through the power of social networking.

How often have you thought to yourself, “I’m going to <insert random conference/city/event here> next week. I wonder who else I know is going.” At this point, there’s invariably a chain of ill-timed emails, inevitably missing someone who is actually going to be in the same place as you at the same time. Dopplr aims to resolve this issue through providing a way for those serendipitous moments to be under your control, rather than left to random chance.

After signing up for Dopplr, you enter your upcoming travels, building a list of your movements. As you add connections with people you know, Dopplr comes into its own, letting you, and your connections, know when you will be in the same place at the same time.

As you can see from the image above, I have an upcoming trip to Sydney where two of my friends will also be there, and a part of my US holiday in October sees me in San Francisco with another two folks.

The Dopplr permission model is interesting, being completely invitation-based. You have to explicitly invite other travelers to see and interact with your information and they need to invite you to see theirs in return. They intend to keep it this way, as they see travel plans and location as a private matter to be shared only when a user wants to. It also means that for most users, joining Dopplr will mean joining an existing network of people you already know. That’s a little different to most social networks and certainly rich in the connectedness that social networks rely on.

Dopplr hooks into the growing Microformats movement. Any URL you supply to Dopplr with the hCalendar format embedded will be added to your calendar of travels. So, you can enter the URL of an event at Upcoming and have that event in your Dopplr travels. I imagine it will only be a matter of time before you’ll be able to let Dopplr know about your “all my events” feed from somewhere like Upcoming and it will consume and display all those events automatically.

Dopplr also allows you to leverage the power of your travels is by providing iCal and Atom feeds of your listed trips. These two formats allow subscription by most of the calendar tools web workers use.

The Dopplr crew have many features in the pipeline – an API to allow mashups with other services (you can see a proof of concept here) and a full text message interface as well as IM and email. Perhaps most interesting is Dopplr’s intention to implement tools to measure the greenhouse impact of your travels and to allow you to purchase carbon credits against your travels. Even you can be carbon neutral!

You can follow Dopplr’s progress at their blog and they are currently taking signups for the beta program.

Ever felt that forums just didn’t do it for you? That IM didn’t have the permanence? Problem solved! Aussie startup Tangler, which has recently gone into public beta is, in the words of its CEO, Martin Wells:

…[blurring] the lines between what you might think of as traditional instant messaging, chat, mailing lists and forums. We’re web-based and topically structured like a forum, but interaction is real-time, like instant messaging.

And that’s pretty much how Tangler works. Like traditional forums, there are subjects – what Tangler calls Groups, each containing one to many Topics. In addition there are also significant social networking features. Users can have Contacts and keep track of the conversations their friends are engaged in. As a Tangler user, you can join any public Group, and you can also create your own Groups, either public or closed, invitation-only Groups.

Wells suggested to me only half-seriously that Tangler is “Discussion 2.0.” Tangler does offer more than both traditional forums and instant messaging. Its value is in the ability to host long-term, searchable discussion on a topic, yet conduct it in real time.

You enter Tangler in the Home screen. Here, you’ll see your most recent Group invitations from your Contacts, along with recent activity in topics you’ve been involved in. You’ll also see a selection of your Groups and Contacts. There’s also a menu with options to go through to a rich search based on Groups, a full list of your Groups, your Contacts and Recent Activity.

When you’re in a Group, you can choose to work either in Chat or Post mode. Chat mode is real time, just like IM. Post mode is more like traditional forums. The editor has a number of rich tools, including the ability to embed video.

Tangler’s not yet feature complete. Wells said RSS, an open API, and tagging are in the works along with support for embedding real-time discussion inside other web sites.

Tangler also has a desktop tool, the Notifier, available on Windows, OS X and Linux. You can use it when you’re busy with other stuff to keep up with what’s happening with your Tangler Groups and Contacts.

Tangler has managed to attract a number of Web 2.0 startups into the fold to use it as their place to host user-facing discussion. Startups like OmniDrive, Ma.gnolia, Skitch, Jajah and Mum-focused social network mumspace.net amongst a host of others are all hosting beta tester discussions on Tangler, often in real time and with company staff taking a significant role.

Following on from our post with tips for reorganizing your workspace for better productivity, we at Web Worker Daily want to know how you’ve arranged your own physical desktop. You can tell us about it in the comments or take a picture and share it via the Flickr group we set up.

Here’s what my workspace looks like:

My MacBook Pro is lifted up on a Griffin Elevator. This excellent product has made a significant difference to the amount of head tilting I have to do. Also aligning the top of the MacBook Pro screen with the top of the monitor makes a big difference ergonomically.

I’ve eliminated as many cables as I can – I have an Apple Wireless Keyboard and an Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse. I also use wireless networking, despite being just inches from the router most of the time. I have a 4-port USB hub under the Elevator for attaching my camera, USB keys and other such stuff. I’d prefer to have one of these sexy LaCie jobs, but at over AU$100, that’s an expensive hub! The rest of my cables are organized using velcro cable tape to attach them to the Elevator or cluster them behind the desk.

On clustering, I cluster my apps too. Apps where I don’t spend a lot of time – iTunes, Mail, Skype – but that I want open live on the 17″ monitor. Busier apps, where I do a lot of work – Firefox, NeoOffice, Lightroom and the like, stay on the MacBook Pro screen.

The only other kit I have on the desk is the router and storage – lots of it. I have a home-made NAS made up of a Linksys NSLU2 and a 500Gb HDD. Using the NSLU2 makes it available over the network to the other computers in the house as well as to me when I’m on a client site. I also carry a portable 80Gb USB HDD around with me when I’m away from the office.

Using an antique desk, while not suited to a large computer, is great for the notebook form factor. It also has a lot of drawers – seven, in fact. Those drawers hide paper, pens, folders, etc. My trays are over to the left of my desk (out of the photo) on a filing cabinet. I also keep company files and my GTD files in the cabinet.

So, what’s your setup like? Describe it here in the comments. Add a photo to your Flickr account, annotate it if you’d like, and make sure you add to to the My space NOT MySpace group photo pool.

Not all of us are capable of designing a rocking site for our web worker business. The large number of really dodgy-looking sites out there on the Web is living testament to that! SiteKreator offers hope to the non-designers among us with a cheap (free for the base version) way of getting a professional-looking, fully-branded site up and running without an insane level of time and money wasted.

SiteKreator’s four levels of subscription offer additional benefits for each step you climb. At the top, US$39.95/month level, you get the full benefit of:

• customizable design with configurable color schemes, banners and page elements
• image galleries
• forums and blogs with RSS
• customizable forms
• mailing lists
• member-only areas, and
• project collaboration

That’s quite a feature set. Especially considering that we’re talking about less than US$250/year.

The AJAX-driven editing tools offered by SiteKreator are intuitive and obvious once you get used to the interface.

All editing is fully contextual. You can see the contextual widget icons (small, color-coded squares) in the screenshot above. You can hover over any icon for access to a full range of controls relevant to that site element. Controls might be for additional menu elements, styles, or a full rich-text editor.

You get to see the benefit of your changes immediately in the “stage” version of your site. Once satisfied, you publish your changes to the live site and you’re away!

For a hosted and online application, SiteKreator is very feature rich. Everything you might want has been thought of. It’s a complete application and one that I would be happy to use if I needed a site but wasn’t equipped to develop it myself or pay for custom development.

And, in a great example of a vendor eating their own dog food, SiteKreator uses its own product to develop and host their site!

For web workers inside businesses, gaining access to social computing tools can be a significant uphill battle against a world that seems not only to not know or care about del.icio.us, LinkedIn, corporate blogging and wikis but to be actively against their introduction to the workplace. This might be frustrating, but there are things that you can do as a web worker in cube-world.

First, treat yourself as an intrapreneur – an entrepreneur inside the wall – a cubicle commando. Take yourself and your goals seriously, and be truly passionate about them. The can’t-doers who want to kill your ideas will push back, but with the right attitude you can probably bring them around.

Second, consider management’s point of view - this is a high emotional intelligence approach and is likely to be a big plus on your side. It doesn’t matter that you understand the benefits to you of social computing. What matters is that you understand how to communicate the benefits to management. Make sure you:

• address management goals – change that offers improvements to existing processes and boosts productivity is more likely to win support than change to the way the business is managed;
• suggest slow and measured adoption – the softly, softly approach where tools are adopted by small self-selecting groups who then socialize the benefits to other parts of the business by word of mouth drives bottom-up “groundswell” adoption;
• reduce risk - potential threats to business will scare management off in a second. Keeping adoption within the business while acceptance and understanding grow can benefit in the long run when tools must eventually break through to the outside world;
• get IT on your side – you’re going to need to play with these folks eventually and they may end up being the implementers of your quiet revolution. With IT on your team, you have another ally in the fight.

Third, research as much as you can. There are lots of great articles and academic research on the benefits of social computing in business – usually termed Enterprise 2.0. Read the latest work on approaches to take and the benefits realized by businesses who have done the work before you. Organizations like IBM, Sun, The New York Times and a big business favorite, SAP, have all undertaken significant social computing initiatives in recent years that have resulted in measurable positive change. Knowing that what you propose isn’t as radical as it might seem can be very reassuring to management. Thinkers like Harvard Business School’s Dr Andrew McAfee, ZDNet and Web 2.0 Journal’s Dion Hinchcliffe and IBM’s Luis Suarez are all doing excellent work in this area and should be on your required reading list.

There’s no need for the push to introduce social computing to your company need be a hard, unpleasant fight. Go in armed with the right attitude and an understanding of the benefits and you might just be corporate blogger #1 by the end of the year.

Want your social applications to make your work life rock? It’s all about connectedness. Applications such as LinkedIn, Twitter and the new kid on the block, Tangler, all rely on strong connectedness in providing benefits to you.

LinkedIn can be incredible as a way to connect with colleagues and their extended professional network and to get answers to business-related questions. You could connect with a potential client, or employee, or experts and mentors, or a future employer. But without a critical mass of connections, LinkedIn is next to useless. You end up with a small or non-existent 3rd-level network – a web of contacts that’s barely a single thread.

Twitter offers an incredibly fun way to keep continuous partial attention on your contacts. It’s a voyeuristic, fast-paced view of what your mates are up to and into. Better yet, if you choose to follow some of the gurus, you can pick up stories and links well before they hit the blogosphere. But only a few contacts, it’s plain boring. The “right” number is probably around 10 contacts across friends, industry experts, news makers and breakers before your stream becomes engaging.

Tangler is an interesting mashup of traditional forums and IM-style chat that’s recently gone public beta. You build connections in two ways – Contacts and Groups. Contacts are the people you know and communicate with. Groups are exactly that – subject-focused groups of conversation topics. With Tangler, the same connectedness phenomenon occurs. When you have too few Contacts or Groups, it loses its appeal. You either have nobody to talk to, or nothing to talk about.

This critical mass of connectedness is common across all social applications. It doesn’t matter whether it’s del.icio.us or Flickr or Upcoming or Last.FM or AllConsuming or even something as Web 1.0 as Google Groups.

The critical mass of connectedness is closely related to Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of the tipping point. As the number of users and their activity grows, social applications get better, often exponentially so. Ideally the early users of a social application are Gladwell’s “connectors”, and they “yawn” a lot. These people drive uptake and encourage others to join in, increasing connectedness. Soon, the volume of users and the connections between them reaches a point where real value is offered.

If you’re using social applications but not getting value, you’ve got some choices:

• take the easy way out and give up
• become a connector and bring in users
• build your connectedness by actively joining in.

Don’t forget, a critical mass of connectedness is the driving force behind getting value from social applications.

Guest contributor Stephen Collins is a management consultant, information architect and user-centered design specialist from Canberra, Australia.