So with a long holiday stretch approaching, the husband out of town and nothing to do except clean the house and deal with 6,000 emails, I did what any sensible woman would do and joined Twitter.

It’s interesting, particularly in the ways its foundations are contrary to a lot of the other wildly popular social networking applications. I really like the terseness (you can only enter 140 characters per message) and the IM interface; I love things that integrate with what I have running already instead of making me use YAFA (Yet Another Feckin Application.) I can see how it would be handy as a social notepad, and lends itself to building, for example, a sidebar blog within another kind of content. (Incidentally, has anyone coined the term sideblarg yet? Because if not, I so call it.)

I also like the openness of it; anyone can click a button to follow your Tweets, and you can likewise follow anyone you’re interested in. It’s very expansive; you can even browse people’s Following lists to pick up other folks you want to follow, too.

This is exactly what I was doing, in fact, when I browsed through to Anil Dash’s Twitter page and hit my wall of Twitter understanding.

1,780 followers? On Twitter? Seriously?

With all due deference to Anil Dash, a lively thinker who throws pearls before swine on a regular basis, it is simply unfathomable to me that 1,780 people care what he had for dinner last night. (It was oxtail soup, in case you were wondering. You read it here first 1,781st.)

Now, the man is a pretty high profile web celebrity with a lot of blogshphere credibility via his work at Six Apart, Movable Type and TypePad, so I can see why people are interested in what he’s saying, what he’s thinking about and what is catching his attention. But having to wade through the inanities of family dinners, canine conversations, concert replays and descriptions of random passing tourists to find out that Anil is thinking about maybe organising a NYC tech conference is a pretty high noise to signal ratio. And I’m somehow doubting that if one day, he magically unlocks the secret of life, the universe and everything and wants to share it with the rest of us, he’ll choose to do so using Twitter.

I mean, it’s not like the guy doesn’t have a quite popular blog.

I am not, by the way, in any way knocking what Anil Dash chooses to Tweet. He’s using Twitter in exactly the right way; the constrained input of Twitter practically begs for the minutia of anyone’s life. And of those 1,780 people following, there are presumably a number who are close enough to him to care about that level of detail in Anil’s life.

It’s the other 1,680 people I’m wondering about.

For anyone ever tasked with user interface and step-through design, this is an absolute gold mine. (For anyone else, I have no doubt it’s incredibly dull. Sorry about that.) It’s a categorised collection of UI screen captures, from logins and alert messages to 404s and permissions forms - all the stuff we routinely design all over again, with varying results.

It’s the Flickrwank* of Brian Christiansen, who explains this repository by way of an oft-repeated conversation in his office:

Hey, did you see the new Staples.com homepage?

Yeah, I did. I noticed that they created a top-level tab labeled ‘Ink & Toner’.

Interesting, huh?

Yeah.

And for anyone who has ever lead a client through the UI process, that’s all he needs to say. For anyone who hasn’t, it means that people buy a ton of ink and toner online; that Staples shifts a lot of it; and that search metrics and user testing showed visitors were struggling through tiers of categories and complex searches to find this core product before the re-design.

But you don’t care. All you care about is that you can find ink and toner really, really easily at Staples.

*Not pejorative.

I noticed an interesting screenshot in Bernie Goldbach’s Flickr stream from November 29th - Trend Micro’s new browser plugin, TrendSecure, flagging Boards.ie as Undesirable.

Intrigued, I went through the whole rigmarole of digging IE out, dusting it off, installing TrendSecure, and then turning off what little security IE offers in order to enable Trend’s security browser plugin.

Apparently, sometime in the last two weeks Boards.ie has been upgraded to Threat Level Elmo: Dangerous. According to Trend, we should all

avoid this page or use considerable caution when viewing it.

Priceless. If they consider Boards to be dangerous, fuck knows how they classify PROC…

There’s been a bit of a buzz lately across Irish blogs about the cleverly named Pix.ie. Apparently it’s like Flickr, but not. Since I’m officially declaring myself to be all Flickr’d out, thank you, I am a prime candidate for this service: I’m in Ireland, I take photos, and I need somewhere to store them.

But what I really want to know before I sign up is this: will Pixie connect me to other Pix.ie users? Because I want to upload photos, not be “networked” to new friends.

I know I’m ridiculously old and probably a Luddite, but the more everything converges, the more I appreciate things with discreet purpose. I do not want to use my mobile to take pictures, I do not want to use my computer as a telephone, and I do not want to use my alarm clock to play MP3s. I have a camera to take photos, a telephone to make phone calls, and an MP3 player to play music.

The iPhone is my idea of convergence hell. It’s a camera! It’s a movie theatre! It’s an MP3 player! It’s a web browser! It’s a GPS! It’s a €400 alarm clock!

It’s a phone. Says so right on the tin. But, alas, no.

Similarly, the internet is just awash these days with sites busy converging their users into social networks. Despite my crankiness, I actually enjoy (and am fascinated by) any number of sites who’s primary function is, in fact, social networking. The problem is that everything is a social network these days. I keep expecting Tesco to offer to connect me to people who buy the same brand of bogroll as we do the next time I log in to order the shopping.

The temptation for developers to dive into this hot internet arena is, of course, enormous. I understand how databases work; I understand that when User A and User B and User C all tag different photos with the same phrase, it takes a huge amount of willpower to not leverage your data, to not connect the dots, and to not link these users together into some flavour of social network.

But man, do I wish they would resist. I am on Orkut, LinkedIn, and Facebook (though it will be a cold day in hell before I register for Bebo or MySpace.) I have IM accounts with ICQ, MSN, Trillian and Yahoo. I belong to 25 websites where I can pick up messages sent me from other users. I have 22 email addresses, seven phone numbers, and three blogs with open commenting. I cannot maintain this level of connection. I don’t understand how anyone can, in fact.

Flickr started out as a photo storage site with a necessary layer of user connections on top to manage privacy. I would argue that it’s now the web’s most successful social networking site, with some photo storage thrown in as a bonus. Photographs are now just the social currency of Flickr. Possibly I just find that irritating because I’m a crap photographer, but really, I went for the images and not for the people behind them.

So if it’s not to much to ask, Pixie, I’d just like some photo storage, please.