I don’t know if I’m excited or disappointed by the number of companies, platforms and ideas that are popping out every day! Being spoiled with choice is really good, but it really sucks when it comes to deciding which service I want to use and support.
The latest service I heard and which seemed really interesting is fav.or.it, but I was also interested in Hictu, Pownce, Jaiku, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Locr, etc, etc, etc… you get the idea
I signed up on some of them, but I didn’t really use them considerably, hence the following thoughts.

Things I’m interested: I like sharing and comment images, videos, internet related stuff, thoughts about new ideas and experiences.

My constrains: I would like one repository for all of this. Images, text and everything should be in one place I can control, backup and shutdown at anytime without too much hassle. I have already a wiki-based website and a self-hosted wordpress blog and I don’t want to throw away the time I invested in those two system. I use heavily emails (possibly because it’s still a one-way system. ie. not like a chat which is a real time two-way system) and I like “pulling” information using RSS feeds (however, I would also like to change the way I read feeds but it’s a long story) and I have different way of interacting depending on who’s the target audience (ie. “A la Tumblr” with my friends for example).

What I’m after: As it is now, I’m not asking for much. I’d just like a service which satisfy the following two requirements:

• Seamless. I don’t want to start signing up, fill long forms, change too many privacy settings and in general waste too much time just for one service. I don’t want to change too much my lifestyle just to use, again, just one service. I don’t want to invite all my friends and ask them to join any service. The service should be mobile and compatible with my Nokia phones. It should be easy to use. It should not feel like an extra job when using it or just to keep up with the “admin work” of these services.

• Converged. I just want to use one service for all my needs. I am a strong believer that a service which performs only one function but well (e.g. Google search) is more useful than 10 badly implemented ideas put together and converged services seem to be the opposite of one-but-efficient services . However, I think this applies only when there is a clear need for that idea. The abovementioned services might be useful at times, but they are superfluous at first so I don’t really want to start using any of them until I’m convinced they are not a fad.

So, what are my alternatives? Well, after signing up for many of these services/platforms over the years, I’m back to square one with the blogging platform. That’s probably why, so many people blog. It’s easy and powerful enough.
Anyway, I’ll have to change few things on my blog. I decided to change the content of my blog to share something more personal and create different feeds. One for public, one for not-so-public (consumption). If you are subscribed (not many anyway ), sorry for the inconvenience.

-Reda

PS. Web2.0 mind-map picture was taken from Wikipedia