I’ve been trying the social networking thing, with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I guess I have one on Plaxo, but I never use it unless someone wants to connect to me. There’s nothing really wrong with Plaxo, but I kind of got stuck on Linked In and see no reason to change.

FYI, we have a SQLServerCentral LinkedIn group if you’d like to join.

However tracking what I posted and friends posted hasn’t been easy. I have to refresh the pages on the web, and I constantly forget to do that. As much as I don’t want to be too distracted, I do like to glance over there.

So when I saw FriendFeed, I wanted to give it a try. It seemed like a good idea, grabbing all my accounts, including my Picasa account, and consolidating things into one interface. I signed up, included my accounts, and for a few days I liked the real-time update window that I kept up behind other windows. It refreshed automatically and I could see what was happening.

However as I added a few people on Twitter to follow, I noticed that their updates weren’t appearing on my FriendFeed. I searched around, but the minimalist design of Friendfeed made it hard for me to figure out what’s working or not. And I couldn’t find an easy way to add more people to my feed without inviting them, which is a somewhat intrusive thing to do.

So after a couple weeks, I’ve given up on Friendfeed. My laptop has a Vista Gadget on the side that tracks Twitter updates, but I’m searching for one on XP. I’ve just started using Twitterlicious and I’ll post a review on that next week.