I know … SO MANY SOCIAL NETWORKS … SO LITTLE TIME!  Isn’t FaceBook more than enough already!  Who has time to keep up with it all?  Plaxo keeps us all connected while also helping us save some time while doing so.

Here is a description of what Plaxo offers (from the website itself):

Plaxo keeps you in touch with people you care about.

When fellow Plaxo members you’re connected with move to a new home, change their cell phone number or change jobs, you’ll know… and your address book will be updated automatically.

So, if everyone gets on Plaxo, it can actually save time by keeping us all up-to-date on each other’s contact information.  We all know 100s even 1000s of people within our own networks, and most of those 100s and 1000s also know each other (this is the “plexus”).  How many times do we all get emails from somebody saying, “I just changed my phone number, please update your records”.  So then you might feel obligated to take a moment out of your busy day to open your address book, copy the new number over, etc.  Or how many times do you get an email from someone asking for your mailing address or fax number because they “lost it”, or even more–they ask if you just happen to have the information for someone you both may know.  This is not sustainable information management.  

As an alternative: what if everybody’s contact information updated itself everywhere automatically?  Plaxo aims to provide this for us with a service called “Pulse”.  Plaxo will also automatically make recommendations to you of people who you are already interacting with in email and/or other social networks … so, over time, it’s fairly straight forward to build up our shared social plexus.  I actually don’t use Plaxo much for general social interaction (I save that mostly for FaceBook).  Yet, it is good to be on Plaxo so that my social contact information is updated regularly.

It’s the 21st century.  We have the technology to move beyond the aggradation of trivial inconveniences that come with greater social connectivity–and get down to better uses of our time, energy, and attention!  Let’s focus less on establishing and maintaining connections, and more on the processes and qualities of being in connection!

Join the Plaxo plexus!

I also recommend that you download an extension toolbar that will keep your computer’s address book in sync with your Plaxo Pulse account.

See you on the Plaxo Pulse people plexus!

Palantir

Some crafty engineers over at FaceBook recently created the Palantir open-source computer application (named after one of the powerful “seeing stone” orbs in Lord of the Rings) that visualizes live activity on the FaceBook social network. See a video of the application here.

Lexicon

The FaceBook Lexicon is an application that presents key word usage on member’s post pages, with all types of options for comparative demographics. Below is a sample image from Lexicon that shows the number of keyword posts for “Obama” from June 6 – Nov 31, 2008.  Accordingly, the “Obama” posts peak around election day.  Although males show a slight majority of keyword “Obama” posts in this graph, I had also done a different comparative graph that shows females posting “Obama” nearly twice as much as males around election day.

People Power

Here is a report on FaceBook’s greatest energy source: people power.  Literally speaking, the amount of energy people use burning calories while interacting with the social network (more than 2 billion minutes per day) exceeds the amount of electricity used to power the computer server network.

All together and more, these advents of information technology are literally beginning to bring increasing definition and expression to the multitudinous aspects involving the living, breathing, thinking, seeing body, mind, and spirit of the global collective.