I have been admittedly less than discreet in my exposure to the Internet in recent years. I tend to sign up for any service that looks mildly useful. The fact that GMail filters spam as efficiently as it does, has a lot to do with it. My thoughts on security and transparency must wait. Anyway…

So we have a lot of social networking sites now. For me, it actually started with early players like Ryze, LinkedIn and Multiply—all of which I found worthless for my needs (if I had any driving need for social interaction on the Web to begin with)

Then came Orkut, which was interesting, but ugly. I have a MySpace account, which I signed up for just to see what all the fuss was about. I didn’t get it. Still don’t. I finally settled on Facebook, which is my current social network of choice. It serves little, if any purpose in my life, save for linking me to some distant acquaintances who I would otherwise be completely disconnected from. The apps are disgusting, their default behaviour is to spam, and the whole thing seems to bring out the idiot in everyone. I think there’s a vast population of Web users out there that seem to have adopted a completely retarded, obnoxious view on how to conduct relationships and interactions online. I also think that this population will eventually be the majority. That is when I will put my fountain pen to better use. Anyway…

So there’s a bunch of other sites I’m registered with as well (Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Digg, etc)—all of which have some ‘social’ play. Unsurprisingly, there are now services that help you keep up with or update these sites in one place. Some that I’ve tried include:

Pownce: This was supposed to aggregate Twitter, Jaiku etc. My expected behaviour is to aggregate my ‘feeds’ from those accounts for a single view, as well as a one-to-many publish option. I don’t get any of this, which leads me to just not get it.

Friendfeed: Same as above. What I find is that it behaves just like another stand-alone service. What exactly does it do?

At this point, I think I will begin deleting my accounts from these services, if they allow it.

One bright spot recently was the announcement of the new Evernote closed beta. After several sign-up requests, I finally got an invitation. This service, I believe, has the most potential to make an impact. The premise is simple: much like Google’s Notebook service, Evernote allows you to ‘clip’ pieces of web pages, images, whatever, and store them in an online archive. Where Evernote differs is in it’s more powerful off-line, native clients—currently available for Mac OSX, Windows and Windows Mobile.

But that’s not why I signed up. Evernote also does mobile really well. They publish your online notebooks as IMAP accounts, allowing me to access my notes from the iPhone’s own email client. There’s no search in this way, but tags show up as folders. Useful. There’s also a reasonable mobile web interface, which works as advertised. The killer app, in my opinion, is Evernote’s smart image recognition. You can take a picture of a label, billboard, business card or whatever, and just email it to your account. If the picture is not horrid, Evernote will recognize the text within it, index and enable search. Very cool!

So far, I’ve had mixed results with the recognition feature. A full-size 2MP image of a business card in low light just gave me a name, while a VGA snap of an ad-flex in good light worked better. The bookmarklet used to clip webpages is also spotty, but works for the most part. The potential is there though, and I’m hoping the service gets even better in this regard.