Two things come to mind:

1. I will never get to own the Abuzz domain – The New York Times still has it on lockdown until 2012 and I doubt they’ll be surrendering it after that.
2. How ahead of its time was this site?

Launched in 1999, the NYT Abuzz site was “social networking” before sites like Myspace and Facebook took center stage.  There was a question/answer format (similar to Yahoo! Answers or Mahalo Answers), a discussion section (which isn’t that original – forums and USENET were around for years) and section for publishing commentary, such as book reviews, reactions to news stories, and so on.

On top of that, the site attempted what many sites are still trying to do today – filter information and deliver only what it thinks will be relevant to you.  Pretty amazing stuff.

As you can see here, the site shut down on September 2, 2004, citing limited resources.  The fact that the NYT has held on to the domain name long afterwards means they think the domain is a valuable asset (I agree).  Do they have plans to utilize it in the future?  Who knows.  If not, and if anyone at the Times is reading this, I’ll gladly take it off your hands. ;)

We’ve created two worlds, now – I hope you all realize that. Before all these social networks crept into our lives, we already had two lives – our work/class lives and our personal lives. Social media has now taken the professional version of ourselves, usually kept in an 8-hour cage, and stretched it out to encompass almost the entire rest of our days.  We’re hiding our Myspace accounts.  We’re changing our last names on Facebook.  And if you’re like me, your own personal blog isn’t even yours – it’s a place for people to come and read thoughts from the “professional” you.  Ugh.  We do all of this just so we can keep what little of our lives we have left.  It sucks.

Personally, I’d love to be done with the nonsense, but too many “brilliant” people think that they can judge someone’s morality and work ethic by looking at some drunk camera phone pictures taken on the weekend.  The irony is that we’re all probably doing the same things – so why does anyone get the right to judge?

I wish I could just throw a link out there and say, “Here’s where you can find me writing uncut and without reservation,” but it would be tied to me through this site and, well – you know why I can’t do that.  I think we shouldn’t have to fear the reprocussions of what we say, but free speech is only free if everyone else is playing along.  Right now, they aren’t.  Until they are, we’ll all continue to hide who we really are online.  Transparency is a joke and will continue to be a joke until we all stand up to this crap.

You can take a look at my FriendFeed stream today and find out that I’ve used both Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook today – not because I posted or tweeted this myself, but thanks to a tracker I installed for Wakoopa, a site that aims to socialize our application usage.  Going through the public stream, I can see that LouCypher has recently used Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger.  Hasan has accessed the Command Prompt and used WordPress.  Haggis (Sean) has visited Classmates.com.

Doesn’t this seem like a bit much?

I pinged some of the folks on Twitter and FriendFeed for answers to this question – Are we sharing too much on social networks?

@jak440 – “YES!”
@hearsmusic – “When people are dying for changing their status on facebook, I think so, yes…”
@johnrogers – ” “too much” is relative to me. I am who i am, and tend to share everything. nothing to hide really”
@hbombx – “Yeah, some of the “meet me hear if you want” sound too much like “I’m alone and easy to abduct.” ”
@rahsheen – “I don’t know about sharing too much, I was actually thinking of going the full monty….ok not really…LOL” 
@rorowe – “There was a great article in Wired ~6 mo. ago about a guy who literally put *everything* online so the FBI’d leave him alone.”  (He later tweeted the article URL – here it is.)

Amber aka SDA - “A little”
Akiva Moskovitz - “What do you mean? I don’t even know your blood type… yet.”
Helen Sventitsky - “I’ve always shared too much. Half my offline friends block me because I’m such an embarrassment to them online, LOL! :D”
JMS likes you - “Perhaps”
Niki Costantini - “Well, it’s not that we are obliged to share everything, aren’t we? So “too much” is only up to us at the end of the day :)”
Sparky - “You are right. People share way too much on social networks. Like Akiva’s social security number 526-87-2412″
Vijayendra Mohanty - “Sharing personal information happens when you are not really ‘doing it’ also. Like metadata. The other kind of sharing (links, pictures) is a good thing, isn’t it?”
anna awesomesauce - “I was talking to some college students about to enter the work force, and one was like, “should I clean up my facebook page” answer: vehemently “yes!”
 tiffany needs a tissue - “i am. i need to stop that.”

So what do you think – are we sharing too much? And what do you think of Wakoopa – does this type of application cross the line between acceptable and “way too much”?  Comment away! :)

First off, I’m going to give credit where credit is due.  This great idea is not one of my own – it belongs to Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.  Darren thought it would be great if all his readers were not only connected by his blog but also by the multitude of social networks on the internet.  The ProBlogger Social Media Love-In was born, and by the looks of it, was an incredible success.

I’d now like to replicate Darren’s idea in Central PA.  Some of us have met at Tweetups, some of us have commented on each others blog, but do we really know how much we have in common with one another?  It’s probably a lot more than we think.

Here’s the deal.  I’m going to list all the social media accounts I have.  If you want, you can add/friend/subscribe to me – don’t be shy.  What I want YOU to do in the comments is the same – list your accounts on social media sites.  Everyone can then add one another and we’ll be a much more networked group.

My social media accounts:

Twitter
FriendFeed
Facebook
Myspace
Plurk
LinkedIn
Digg
Last.FM
YouTube
Flickr
Brightkite
Upcoming
Dopplr

Let the games begin! :)

Unfortunately, I feel that being fully immersed in the startup world and the ever-changing landscape of the web has put him out of touch with those who will make or break many of these ventures; the every-day guys and gals.

That isn’t a knock on Robert at all.  I’m totally envious of what he gets to do, and if things go my way, maybe one day I’ll have as many eyes and ears on me.  You can call my BS if you want, but if I had to choose between being a voice among tens of thousands of voices in the Valley or being one of just a few here, I’d choose here.

I’m located within spitting distance of a state capital that is severely lacking in web presence.  There are not many people on Twitter in Harrisburg – how else would a college student be able to chit chat with local news reporters at will?  We have very few serious bloggers, but these bloggers consistently scoop our newspaper writers on a regular basis.  There aren’t many people here who get it yet, and to me, that’s exciting.

Those few of us bloggers/early adopters that do exist here have the opportunity to do something great, something not a lot of people can say they’ve done.  We have, in our hands, the opportunity to transform an entire city.  We have the chance to completely change the way this city communicates, consumes media and sees the world as a whole.

I would guess that 97% of Harrisburg’s citizens have never heard of Twitter.  They’ve never heard of FriendFeed.  Some might think that Google is the only search engine in existence.  These people use email, AIM, Myspace and Facebook.  They read their favorite sites using bookmarks, not RSS feeds.  They find new music through the radio and word of mouth, not sites like Last.FM or Pandora.  The early adopter pace is just too fast for them to keep up.

I do not look down on these people at all.  Many early adopters seem to think highly of themselves for having been on something “first”, before it was cool.  I do not think that way.  For me, these people are not a heavy anchor holding us back.  Instead, they are the sails.  When they flock to a service, then you know you have something special.

I look foward to helping introduce them to this new world.  And Robert, next time you go to Tel Aviv, save me a seat?