SiliconBeat

There’s a good post at Valleywag on the social networking hoax Pheltup making a fake claim that it bought real social networking start-up Plurk. Or as blogger Melissa Gira Grant calls Plurk: “a company that shouldn’t exist.”

I’d been hearing about Plurk for awhile (meaning, in Twitter-accelerated time, days). And it just happened that I got an invite to the beta the other night from a friend who said half-jokingly in an e-mail: “Better check out Plurk, buddy. All the cool kids are …” So I did, and now I’m in Plurk, which calls itself a social journal. It graphs your various social networking tools on a visual time line:

I’m having a hard time grasping Plurk. And it’s got me thinking that I’m overextended when it comes to this social networking stuff.

Earlier this week, I had installed something called Yoono which is a Firefox browser extension that creates a sidebar in the browser. The advantage, in theory, is that it can pull in the feeds from all your social networking accounts (Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.) and display them in that sidebar right in the browser. But after a couple of days, I uninstalled it. I was getting little notifications every two seconds when someone updated their status on Facebook, which officially triggered my “too much information” alarm bells.

I continue to play with another beta service called Brightkite. This is a location-based social networking service that asks you to “check-in” at certain places, either using a mobile phone or computer.

Friends can follow you and Brightkite maps your locations and lets you know who else is around you. I like playing with it, but it’s only been useful a couple of times, particularly when I attend some Web 2.0 event where there’s bound to be a lot of early-adopter types. I have a feeling that unless the whole world is on Brightkite, it may never be totally essential.

It has quickly become routine for folks to connect their Brightkite accounts to their Twitter accounts. The result is that Brightkite sends out an automatic update when someone checks in. But then people following you on Twitter start to get lots of messages saying, “I’m at 870 Market Street in San Francisco.” One colleague I follow the other day tweeted: “Anyone else getting sick of BrightKite Twitter updates?”

Of course, managing all these streams has become the new problem to solve. The solution that has a lot of buzz right now is FriendFeed. I started using that a few weeks ago, and it does seem promising. I’ve added my FriendFeed to this blog. That helps pull together things like my Twitter stream, my del.icio.us social bookmarks, YouTube videos, blog posts, even my Netflix queue.

On top of all this, I even run a social networking site, called The Next Newsroom Project as part of a Knight Foundation grant I received last year. The site is built on Ning, which is a platform that lets you start your own social network site for free. But I’ve been invited to join several Ning sites, and it quickly becomes a lot of stuff to keep up with.

All this has left me feeling scattered. And overwhelmed. At the end of the day, most of these places tend to be populated by a core of early adopters. Part of me wants to be in the know. And part of me wants to hang back, let there be one giant shakeout, and then join whatever uber-social networking site dominates when the dust settles. Of course, that will likely never happened.

And so in the meantime, I’ll keep wading through betas. And hoping that digital nirvana is just one more social network away.