TechCrunch has a story up about the ins-and-outs of building a web application in three four days with little to no money. These days with open source tools and web-two-point-owe type open APIs and frameworks, it is easy for a dedicated team of developers, designers and PR/marketing people to bring out something that may just be the next hit of the social media world. Guy Kawasaki knows all about this with Truemors and Alltop. The flipside of that coin, however, is that there will be a proliferation of so many social networking/web-two-point-owe type of tools and sites to choose from, it will be hard to distinguish which ones are worth engaging with or signing up for and which ones will just be contributing to social networking fatigue

Already there is a movement in the direction of lifestream aggregators like Friendfeed and planet type services that pull all your scattered web services and networks you belong to into one central space. That is of course the main raison d’etre for this very blog of mine where I can pull everything together under one roof and my own namespace. Of course the process takes time and effort and it becomes yet another modality to manage and nurture and maintain if you wanna establish a credible and/or professional web presence.

Speaking of lifestream and web aggregator services, the South African blogosphere temporarily experienced a little uproar when Justin Hartman, one of the co-founders of Afrigator.com, blogged about a new RSS aggregator service called regator.com that received some press and buzz over at TechCrunch , Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. Justin and the co-founders and many of the SA bloggerati felt there was a possible case of IP infringement since the logo, name and colorscheme is basically identical to the Afrigator.com properties’ own brand assets. A flurry of comments on Justin’s blog was followed by one of the co-founders of Regator.com posting a comment and basically playing very nice and dispelling any fears and suspicions of foul play or malicious intent. It is a play on aggregator, since it is an aggregation RSS service, alligator seemed a natural and fun mascot, alligators are green, and the top level dot com domain name was available, hence regator.com. It all seems to be a major coincidence and case of morphic resonance and Justin has decided to check out the beta version of regator.com just to set his own mind at ease.

Afrigator.com of course is also an example of how a web app can be put together with enough skill, dedication and ingenuity from the right people combined in a good, efficient team. It is a South African made aggregation service where people submit the best blogs from within South Africa and the rest of Africa and the ones with the most buzz around it (algorithm, algorithm) kind of floats to the top a la digg or techmeme. ReadWriteWeb did an excellent round-up and hat tip to local South African web dev skills last November and this very story also featured in yesterdays uproar about the regator copyright infringement case.

Update, July 05, 2008, 07:30 UTC +2: Scott Lockhart, co-founder of regator.com commented on my blog post about the misunderstanding about them infringeing coincidentally using the same mascot, colorscheme and similar sounding domain name as local aggregator service Afrigator.com I appreciate the effort Scott has gone through to do damage control and set minds at ease and convince evceryone involved of their bona fides and that they really were not aware of Afrigator before yesterday. He also pointed me to Justin’s update and that Justin went over and got access to their entire operation to see that intentions were good. Stii, one of the Afrigator.com co-founders, also did a very diplomatic post and put a nice positive twist on the whole saga.

After a long break from blogging because of project and client commitments (I was Twittering and Facebooking and Friendfeeding and posting to del.icio.us all the time; does that count…?), I have now decided to get a name domain and do a bit of the personal branding type stuff that everyone is talking about

The first step of course was to register my own name as a top level domain (TLD). This starts your journey on the way to projecting a serious, professional image to prospective clients and business partners or just friends on the internet who now can see you’re not just goofing around on the internet the whole time, but that it can actually be used for more serious business and professional networking purposes

So this is the start of my attempt to bring all my different blogs and profiles together under one roof and namespace. The obvious benefit is that it will go a long way towards focusing my attention on only the one major repository of stuff that is scattered all over the web at the moment.

All the different blogs hosted elsewhere and all the different profiles on the different social networks are becoming a bit unwieldy and the trend is nowadays towards aggregated lifestreaming and building your personal brand online.

Doing that will be much easier if there is one place to rule them all, one place to consolidate them, one place to aggregate them all and in lifestreamlining bind them. (Apologies to JRR Tolkien). Hey, did I just make up a new word: lifestreamlining…? Hmmm… So, what exactly is it that I do online that it now deserves a dedicated namespace and aggregation effort…? Web development, mainly on the WordPress content management system platform and everything related to that: registering domain names, hosting those accounts on CentOS Linux servers, setting up and configuring the WordPress CMS, maintaining it and augmenting it with the multitude of plugins and themes available. Of course it’s never that simple, and I shall dedicate a future post to a detailed outline of what all goes into setting up and maintaining blogs for clients. Especially with the advent of Social Media and the myriad services out there, it has become a regular cottage industry. Consultant services to marketing and PR professionals who want to enter the Social Media phenomenon but who do not necessarily have access to a geeky nephew or brother who can set it up and maintain it for them.

Also with the creation of new roles of Social Media Strategists, more and more businesses and big corporations are committing budget to individual who can set up, configure and maintain social media profiles and services for them in the new media landscape where they have to necessarily go where the conversation is happening and the cool kids hang out, otherwise they will just become irrelevant and fall out of everyone’s attention sphere and lose clients and thus business and profit. So, without rambling on too much, that is what I do all the time, getting paid to goof off on the internet all day and put up Facebook and del.icio.us and Friendfeed accounts and profiles for paying clients. Geez, I’ve done it for myself and I’m having a fabulous time, if someone else also want in on the action, they can bloody well pay me for my time and trouble, can’t they…?

Some bright sparks (software engineers) who worked at Google before, came up with a brilliant new lifestream aggregating service called Friendfeed. I am testing the brand spanking new WordPress Friendfeed widget in the sidebar of my blog. What it does is integrate into one service all the disparate profiles and accounts and pull them together, and now with the WordPress widget you can plug it in to your blog sidebar. People who are interested in seeing what you’re up to need only go to one place to see where you’ve done what. For example if you’ve watched videos over at YouTube and marked it as a favourite, if you’ve posted a new blog post at another domain, uploaded Flickr photos, shared Google Reader items from your RSS collection of feeds, listened to favourite last.fm tracks, scheduled an event at upcoming.org or updated your Twitter status with a Tweet or ten, whether you dugg stories on digg or saved del.icio.us bookmarks, it will all show up in one place: your Friendfeed profile.

The main Friendfeed site and web interface also has the ability to let you like things and comment on your stream of events and those of friends whom you have subscribed to. This has led to Friendfeed becoming the destination of choice for many of the more prominent Twitter personalities when Twitter experiences one of it’s notorious hiccups, which is frequent and unexpected and many times it’s a case of guess which functional aspect is gonna be crippled this week while they (hopefully) are hard at work in the background getting things up and running smoothly.

The whole issue of getting all the different social networking/bookmarking sites’ profiles into one page has now become a sort of personal mission for me, both because it makes it easier to manage and also because of the potential it has of becoming a personal publishing platform.

Like your own personal media network, where you decide what content from which sources you want to share and how and when and where and why such sharing should be taking place at all.

I have been trying to do this for a while now with Facebook, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, digg and basically just testing out all the different capabilities and functions and special features of each service. I will post more detailed uses of each site after a bit more testing and using and research.

Then of course comes the part where all of this has to be linked and connected up together and I find that Facebook works best for that purpose. There are of course whole tech startups devoted to exactly this, but I find the idea of yet another social networking service to aggregate all the other social networking services on one page a bit silly. I have received my Beta Registration acknowledgment for Twine though, and if all the reviews and write-ups about it so far are true, it should be exactly the kind of thing that is needed to make sense of all the disparate and scattered SNP’s (social networking profiles) into one profile to bind them, one profile to rule them all and in an intelligent manner binding them into One profile to rule them all. (apologies to JRR Tolkien)

For all of this of course you need a good web browser and here, without any hesitation or dispute, i will recommend Firefox, and the stumbleupon, del.icio.us and facebook add-ons (toolbars). Unfortunately Firefox has become a bit bloated of late and freezes regularly and uses too much processing power, so I switched to Seamonkey, which is more lightweight and very fast.

It is easy to, from within Google Reader, click on a link of a news article you like or find interesting, photoblog it with stumbleUpon, bookmark it with del.icio.us, and all of it is updated and cross-updated on your Facebook, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and digg blogs all at the same time or however you have configured or set it up. Our company of course specializes in exactly this as a service to our clients.

Gmail is every web worker’s number one ally, then there is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Reader, Calendar and Maps etc to collaborate on projects with those that share your interests or guest posters/contributors etc. And if you log into secure encrypted SSL Google mail (https://mail.google.com), your Docs and Calendar and Maps are also automatically through encrypted SSL tunnel. And it is all free!!!

With Google Reader you keep track of the most important feeds from around the ‘blogosphere’, specifically those in your own field or sphere of interests and tastes.

What you highlight or bookmark or share depends entirely on your ability to pick newsworthy or interesting items that other people would be interested in seeing or if you have a certain story or project or slant, this can form the basis for the theme of ‘your own personal publishing empire’. With regular, quality content you build up regular and loyal visitors and with more and more regular visitors comes the ability to charge premium rates for ads (custom designed animated ad banners of advertising partners).

For more info on any of these strategies for your company or brand, feel free to mail mario [at] hogsback [dot] net