Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense

I"ve been playing around with social media lately. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, LinkedIn, MyRagan and probably some others that I've forgotten about. I've also got a Flickr account, one at Picasa, this blog, my own (out-of-date) website and a bunch of accounts at sites that have either gone out of business or stopped being of any interest. Oh, and I've also got instant messaging accounts with IChat, Messenger and Google. And speaking of Google, I use a lot of their on-line apps, as well as Gmail. And I've got a Skype account too.

To tell the truth, I'm getting kind of confused about what I'm supposed to be doing with all this stuff. I've started playing around with applications that pull a lot of it together, like Adium, which groups all my IM clients into one beautiful interface. So far, I haven't found anything similar for all these social media sites, with the need to add friends (I don't really seem to have that many) to all of them and follow along with what everyone is doing.

Which of these new tools are you using? Have you found they're helping you be productive? Or do they just give us another excuse to avoid getting to some of the tasks that are filling up our to-do lists? Maybe we should start a group somewhere to talk about this...

One app that's had a lot of press recently is Twitter, which I've signed on to without really understanding what it does. But a couple of weeks ago, Wired Magazine had a story by Clive Thompson that did a good job of explaining some of the complexities. I missed it when it first ran, but a blog post by Neville Hobson pointed me to it. Ironically, Neville heard about it through a "Tweet" from one of his friends.

Here's the link. Let me know what you think.

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New Media, Social Media, productivity