With the purchase of my new iPhone and the reenabling of SMS messages, I’ve started getting back into serious social networking. You know, mobile Facebook updates, Brightkite, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. One of the things I really like about Facebook, Brightkite, and LinkedIn is that you can find friends from your contacts in GMail and other social networking services. I was able to find several friends on several of these networks by importing my contacts.

However, I’m pretty old school as far as “social networking” goes. I was there when AOL first released a stand alone IM client and ICQ was all the rage. Then came the latter entries of Jabber (GTalk for example) and MSN. By far most of my friends and contacts are on AIM. I don’t have email addresses or facebook profiles for them, so I can’t import them into the other social networking sites I’ve started using. This is a big bummer for me because as people change screennames, or quit using one protocol for another, I lose contact with them.

I’m thinking about finding or writing a plugin for one of the popular clients (Pidgin, Digsby, etc) that would allow you to put this information in and share it with your other instant messaging friends. Similar to what Off The Record (OTR) does when it initiates a conversation, you could send a specialized request that would automatically be answered with the information to import into Facebook or whatever social networking site you desire.

If you know of something like this, let me know so I can install it! Otherwise, post some comments on features and clients that should be supported for something like this.

I just downloaded the wordpress app for the iPhone from the apple store and i’m really pleased with it. The word complete feature could use some help but that could also just be my fat fingers. Now I have something productive to do on road and plane trips, and those incredibly long waits at the doctors office.

Sadly I’m going to count this as my blog quotient for the day! Check back tomorrow for more exciting tech writing!

You read correctly – and noticed the play on the Katy Perry song – that I went out yesterday and bought an iPhone. I didn’t mean to… My wife was complaining that she couldn’t hear on her GoPhone so we checked and her contract was eligible for the “phone upgrade”. It’s really just a way to keep that 2 year contract thing going for the phone company. Either way we ended up with a $200 phone for free as part of the contract.

I started looking at the phones (at Wal-mart no less) and saw that they had the iPhone. From my earlier post you probably saw that I was happy with the phone before, but I didn’t like the missing API and the lack of applications. Well, with that solved, it was time to take another look.

My line was eligible for an upgrade as well and I took the opportunity to give the old Samsung the heave ho and purchased an 8 GB iPhone. I’ve already activated it, updated it, synced my contacts, email, and calendar with it, and installed an SSH client and a VPN client. In under an hour! I’m much happier now and I think in time I’ll be pulling down the API docs and having a look at those as well.

The truth though is that I really wanted a Google Android based phone. They are supposed to be coming into the line up in 2009 sometime, but I wasn’t willing to wait that long for a better alternative to the Blackjack II.