I'm using two apps on my computer to follow my microblogging: Gwibber and MahTweets.  Both have the advantage that they don't use Adobe AIR. Gwibber Anyone who reads this blog, knows I'm a huge fan of this software.  I run it every day that I'm in Ubuntu (which is every day...) and I love the great integration that it has with Gnome.  I love the new look that it has (great job @segphault!). As you can see, the sidebar as been shrunk down to icons.  I quite like the the huge character count in the lower right corner.  The app feels very polished. The only issue I have with it is that it needs to have "gwibber-service &" run in a terminal before it will start, but this will be taken care of by the full release (I'm using the Daily PPA).  Also, we don't have status.net support yet, but I'm sure it will be added back in later on in the development.
MahTweets MahTweets is a status.net/twitter/facebook app that runs natively on Windows.  I really like this program, especially since it has all of the features that I need. It runs natively on Windows; ie, I don't need something like Adobe AIR between the program and my OS.  While this allows many programs to be cross-platform, I'd rather just have a program that's native. MahTweets has great integration with Windows 7 in how it works with Aero. This app has multiple columns, similar to Seesmic Desktop.  It doesn't run on AIR, and it includes more microblogging sites than Seesmic does, so I'm using it instead of Seesmic.  I don't want to have to have more than one program to follow my various sites; microblogging is supposed to be a simple way of updating people with what you're doing. I'm looking forward to whatever improvements come with MahTweets.  It's a robust app and I think good things can come of it.

Gwibber has increased a release number (from the 1.x branch to the 2.x branch) and I must say... it's awesome. Screenshot of the new UI: There are some quirks, as with all pre-release software, and I'm running into them as I write this. On first try, I'm noticing these things:

• Notify-osd doesn't seem to work properly, even if you have "show bubbles" checked on the preferences menu.
• Append colon doesn't seem to be working properly, even though I have it checked in the preferences.
• Upon restart, gwibber doesn't keep the same window dimensions as I had it upon exit.  This is a minor issue, though it would be nice to have working.
• Related to the above, gwibber doesn't keep the same position upon restart.  Again, this is a minor issue.
• No Jaiku.  This is minor, but if you use Jaiku (like me), it gives you another reason to drop the service.  I'm not getting as much out of it as I was before.  (Sorry Bugabundo!)

Now that I'm done airing the issues with it, here's the good stuff:

• New UI.  Gwibber has added a sidebar that shows your individual accounts (identi.ca, twitter, facebook, etc).  You can click on the "replies" heading and see all of the replies to your twitter account (for instance).  This is handy if you're trying to track something down in a specific account.  There's also a drop-down menu, but I prefer the sidebar.
• Facebook has the options to "like" and reply to posts.  In the old version, you had to go to Facebook and do your posting and whatnot to individual wall posts.
• Search box at the top of the window.  This is awesome, as I can search on a term and it finds posts related to that term, and returns them by account.  Awesome.
• A refresh button in the toolbar.  This is great, since I can refresh and see what everyone is saying right now.
• Easy access to Favorites on both twitter and identi.ca.  Now, if you've faved a certain post, you can see it easily.
• In the same vein, there's a "Public" filter for both twitter and identi.ca.  You can easily see what people are talking about outside your set of friends.

Do remember that this is from the daily PPA, so it MAY BREAK.  If you need a stable version, use the 1.x branch that's included in Ubuntu or whatever distro you're running.

Ok. Facebook has bought Friendfeed. I've, subsequently, removed all of my info on Friendfeed. I like Facebook.  It's a good platform for keeping in touch with friends, playing silly little games, and all that stuff... BUT, it has been proven several times that Facebook doesn't care about your privacy.  Examples include them changing their TOS (to change rights to photos and such), and also the advertisement photo use.  (NOTE: I have no problem with Facebook making money, but could they find a better way, like through "better" ads?  But I digress...) Now they have Friendfeed.  I still don't know what to make of it, but I did change my "lifestream" to Tumblr.  The only issue with Tumblr is that you can only import 5 RSS feeds or other accounts.  So, using RSS and twitterfeed, I've connected up my wakoopa and Mixx accounts to twitter and identi.ca.  The only overlap I have is the blog, which is fed into Tumblr and to twitter/identi.ca, so my followers will get two notices of it updating.  There's really nothing I can do about it, as I want both there, and I don't feel people should have to click twice to get the the real article. The only thing I feed to Facebook is my blog.  I haven't had twitter/identi.ca hooked up to Facebook for awhile now (too many non-important messages and @'s that didn't make sense to people there, unless they followed me on twitter/identi.ca). I'll keep following the buzz surrounding this, but I wanted to get something out there, as I loved Friendfeed and the ease of getting someone's whole online life (or at least how much they're sharing) in one place.

I'm taking an idea I heard over on Jesse Stay's blog here.  I'm going to (at least try) to post a blog about people I think you should follow on all my services: twitter, plurk, identi.ca and friendfeed. Ok, let's get started. Identi.ca @bugabundo is an Ubuntu alpha tester.  He is interesting if you're into what's going on in Ubuntu development.  Some of his posts are in Portugese, but that doesn't stop me from following him.  I don't understand it (ofc) but he's at least bi-lingual with English. Twitter @afl_com_au is the official AFL (Australian Football League) twitter channel.  If you like Aussie Rules Football, I recommend following them to get the most up-to-date information about players and the Footie scene.  I just started watching AFL games, so this kind of keeps me in the loop. Plurk Plurk is the "social network on a line".  I follow many of the same people on Plurk as I do on identi.ca and twitter.  One of these people is @speedboy.  He talks about tech (I have a theme here...), sport, his girlfriend... normal stuff.  He's interesting.  He's also from Belgium.  He gives an interesting perspective with different things. Friendfeed Gary Vaynerchuk is someone I think I've recommended before, but for twitter.  His friendfeed encompasses all his online stuff... Youtube, blog, etc.  He's the WineLibrary.tv guru, and he is totally down-to-earth.  He's also got a lot of energy.  I always feel energized after watching one of his youtube videos! ~~~ There you have it.  My #followfriday and reasons behind it!  Enjoy.

My social media consumption is getting out of hand. I have identi.ca, friendfeed, twitter and RSS feeds that I monitor throughout the day and respond to when I find something interesting.  Also, I monitor my main gmail account, as well as my job search gmail account, and a yahoo account that's for throw-away sign-ups. I've said before that I use gwibber to monitor my twitter, friendfeed and identi.ca streams; this was fine when I was just following twitter and identi.ca.  The addition of friendfeed (while welcome, don't get me wrong) pushes stuff that I might want to see in my other sites down in the window. (FYI: I'm using the alpha build; the daily PPA, not recommended if you need a stable install.  To install in Ubuntu, follow the instructions here.) I guess the issue I have is that the updates come in fast and furious.  It doesn't help that I follow Robert Scoble and his brother Alex, and both are very active on friendfeed.  I tried to disconnect from them, but I was actually getting some value-added posts from their feeds.  So, I reconnect to both of them, and get back what I was missing when I disconnected from them.  What I'd like, I guess, is to be able to have different tabs of my different lists for friendfeed.  I doubt this is possible right now, but it's something handy to have for the future. On that note, I can hardly wait til Seesmic Desktop rolls out identi.ca and friendfeed support.  This way, I'll be able to further drill down my consumption to organized lists. I heard from @segphault that the list feature is on the roadmap for Gwibber 3.0.  Since we're just hitting the 1.0 release (I think it's slated for Karmic, forgive me if I'm wrong) I have awhile to wait. Also, I like to follow a lot of people to get a wide variety of viewpoints.  This adds to the potiential "noise" I have to deal with.  I've already removed a lot of the rooms I used to follow (over half), and I did the same with identi.ca.  Like, I'm not using choqoK any more, nor KDE, nor Kubuntu, so I left those rooms.  FSF and Gnu are usually both tagged in posts related to them, so I left FSF.  I'm just trying to consolidate things so it's easier to manage.  I did a clean-out of my RSS feeds, removing most of my local RSS feeds, as well as the national news feeds.  I've moved all that stuff over to Google News, an awesome online newspaper.  It just aggregates your news (much like an RSS reader) but in a simple-to-scan format, much like a newspaper.  The links are all to the original articles, so just open them up in another tab to read the article.  Easy. An easy way to cut down on the noise is to shut off the bubble popups for gwibber.  I did that and my desktop is much, much quieter.  I can concentrate on what I'm doing (blogging, reading, etc). All this monitoring, replying and social following can be a full-time job.  I'm thinking about only letting myself check the sites or my beloved gwibber every hour or so.  Has anyone else tried this?  I know only checking my RSS feeds every so often really cuts down on the "ooooh, I have an unread feed" feeling when I'm online.  Specto helps; I have it set to inform me of new feeds every hour, but I'm thinking of changing it to every 2 hours. I guess it's just a case of information overload, and I need to cut down for my sanity.