I guess I’ve been out of the loop lately, or I’m simply getting old, but I had no idea that the Facebook situation has gotten so bad.

What you see on the left side of this post is taken from my girlfriend’s actual profile. Now, it may not look as ugly as your standard MySpace profile, but content-wise it’s probably much worse. I mean, hot damn, there must be a hundred applications in there (this is just a fraction of it, you should see the full profile)!

Being my old stubborn self I’ve refused most of those zombie/vampire/sandwich/etc useless apps and thus my profile still looks quite clean. But, your average Facebook user will take anything thrown at him/her. Thus, my girlfriend can use her Facebook profile to learn how sexy she is, how sexy Santa Claus is; she can have her name analyzed, she can send and receive gifts, food and other shenanigans, she has a graveyard, she can hug, poke, kick, bump, kiss, greet, twist and snowball fight her friends…and absolutely none of this is in any way useful.

Luckily for us, in Facebook you don’t see most of this unless you yourself are subscribed to it. But still, my hopes that somehow Facebook will be a better, more serious social network than MySpace have vanished the second I saw that profile. You may laugh at MySpace’s ugliness, Facebookers, but your own social network ain’t much better. In fact, my girlfriend has mostly switched to MySpace because “it makes more sense.” Go figure.

The question remains: is there such a thing as a useful social network? I’m looking at you, LinkedIn. If you guys and girls reading this, please don’t let your upcoming API turn LinkedIn into something like this, ok?

All this said, has someone tried subscribing to all possible applications on Facebook just to see what’ll happen? If anyone has such aspirations (and the required patience), I’d like to know.

Linking to the source is what us bloggers do, right? However, how exactly do you determine which source is the “right” source? Do you merely link to the site where you first found a news item? Do you link to the sites they linked to? Do you do research and try to find the original source? This is the dilemma that’s been bugging me for the last couple of days.

The thing is, I can make it really easy on myself and just link to wherever I read the news, but is it fair to the other bloggers? What if this site merely wrote a short commentary on someone else’s original story? If you look at Techmeme and how it threads stories, this kind of behavior can completely cut off the original source. If some small blog discovers a story, and then Engadget follows up, and everyone links to Engadget, then Engadget will get the bulk of Techmeme traffic, not the source blog.

So, let’s say we agree that one should always take effort to link to the original source. But things aren’t that simple in this department. Many a time a technology blog will find a mainstream story and find a new, tech-related angle that might make the story even more interesting than the original. In this case, linking to the original source is a bit unfair; especially if I don’t follow this mainstream publication in the first place.

I rarely follow up other stories; I try to do original stories if possible. As far as linking goes, I’m trying to find the original source related to technology and not go further; however, I have a bias towards good commentary and smaller blogs - the big ones are going to get linked to anyway.

I’d like to hear your opinion on this, especially if you’re a blogger! Who do you link to?

I talk to web developers often, and one thing they still say strikes me as weird.

Many of them don’t want their site to self-refresh, or be entirely in Ajax. Let them refresh, they say. I agree that Ajax and Flash is sometimes unnecessary, but on certain type of sites, with lots of fast-changing data, having new data show up without refreshing the page (think stock market data, for example) is essential.

The reason for this is simple: page views are still one of the most important metrics considered when measuring the popularity of a web site.

Many arguments have been brought about page views being dead, and they were all right.

However, old habits die hard. As long as page views are considered to be relevant at all, companies won’t risk having their competition laugh at their puny page view numbers, and they’ll shun elegant Ajax, Silverlight, Flash or Flex solutions and replace them with good old HTML and a refresh button.

Since both Nielsen and comScore have acknowledged this problem and adapted their metrics - Nielsen now tracks how much time visitors spend at the site, while comScore gives more weight to visits instead of page views - web developers should relax and follow suit. Unfortunately, robbing yourself of a potentially important advantage still seems to risky to most of them, so they choose to stick with whatever approach gives them more page views.

If you’re wondering where did the year 2005 from the title come from, it’s the year the term Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) was coined. Now, Ajax is already considered slightly obsolete, and some developers are still afraid to use it because they’ll lose page views. Time to let go of the past, folks.

The launch of Pownce and the big response it received from bloggers and users alike was so full of different explanations and definitions of this new tool that it’s safe to say that no one actually knows what it is.

Some compared it with e-mail; others declared it a mini-blogging service, a chat, a social network, a tumble logging service, or a forum. Personally, I thought it’s most akin to IM, but it doesn’t matter: the wide array of responses proves that all these services have converged and that the differences between them have become seriously blurred.

This is a classic case of forest obscuring the proverbial trees. Let’s take a step back and look what these services do and what are their main characteristics. They’re obviously all about communication. This communication can be:

1) one to one
2) one to many
3) many to many

Furthermore, it can happen in:

a) real time
b) with a delay

And finally, it can be:

x) permanent (which means the same conversation can always be found)
y) temporary (which means that although the contents of the communication might be logged, it’s not directly reachable in a fixed place)

By this categorization, instant messaging would be 1ay; e-mail is 1bx, but it can also be 2bx or 3bx, while blogs and all its varieties - tumblelogs, miniblogs - pretty much fall into the 2bx category.

Of course, with time, these services got more and more features, and now each and every one of them pretty much overlaps all three categories of communication; from blogs having chat widgets, to chat having private, logged channels, it’s hard to tell which is which.

The answer is, of course, not important - who cares if some application is covering several fields? The question is: what we really need, and how do we, the users, minimize the clutter and organize all this into a coherent communication system.

Now, going back to Pownce, it’s easy to see why it’s so confusing. It’s web-based, which makes it akin to a blog (or a miniblog), however it allows for all three types of communication. Basically, it only doesn’t have one thing: it does not happen in real time. Hence my enthusiasm about the service.

Unlike many users who have gotten used to communicate in dozens of different niches, I like having all my eggs in one basket. I’d like to be able to chat in real time, with one or more people, privately or publicly, securely if I choose to, exchange files and links with friends, and have all that readily available, and easy to search through and filter.

So, to answer the question from the title: yes, for me it’s all the same thing. And I want it all in one. Think it can’t all be done in one application? I beg to differ. Pownce still has a long way to go, but it’s on the right track. Many IM services, like Gtalk, could probably easily add some features to come closer to this ideal.

Don’t get me wrong: it doesn’t mean that I expect all these applications (and there are literally thousands that fall into the above categories) to have it all. Some of them will probably always excel at some particular feature and outshine others with it. But - I’ve got to admit - I don’t have time for all of them. I will ultimately choose very few as my means of communication, simply because I don’t want my communication to be fragmented over dozens of different services. Thus, the one that offers more than any other application will be my choice.