Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Yesterday, Dopplr, a social network that allows travelers to track their and their friends travel plans and shows friends that are traveling to the same city you are going to, has launched yesterday and allows registration without invitation. Dopplr is one of my favorite social networks and I am a happy user of the beta for two months now. So if you are traveling from time to time and want to know if we happen to be in the same city, join Dopplr and share your trips with me. I am happy to share as well.

As my readers know, I am aggregating my social network activity in a sidebar of this weblog. Today I am introducing a new feature: The Social Activity Index.

As a blogger I am blogging with varying frequency. There are times when I am full of ideas, blog and bookmark at lot of things, and there are times when hundreds of unread e-mails stack my inbox and I am unable to post a single bookmark to del.icio.us. Based on the data I already collect for the activity aggregation, I decided to boil down all these activity data into a single number by weighting time, type and frequency of an activity and combining this in a single value.

Before I published this post, my activity index was 35, now directly after publication it will be higher, but unless more activity follows, this number will fall again.

For you this number is an indicator of my activity and creativity. If this number is high, I am likely to be open to new ideas and to respond to any new input very fast, if this number is low, you can expect to wait some time for an answer.

What is a high and what is a low value for the activity index? I do not know yet. Let's monitor it for a while and find out.

Plaxo was one of the first social networks to adopt OpenSocial and according to a post at Mashable, this has proven a good decision: Plaxo Sees Exponential Growth as First to Use OpenSocial. The main advantage for Plaxo is that it can build a social network from a glorified address book by leveraging the ability to aggregating other social networks.

If you are on plaxo, just add me to your pulse, I'd be happy to see you.

Believe it or not, for more than one year I have an article draft saved in my weblog system, titled "Social Software". The original reason for writing this was that Dan Diephouse wrote about O'Reilly's Connection, a now defunct social network for geeks. Some days ago Brett Porter wrote about his experiences with social networks, and I decided to start over with this blog post.

Being user of some social networks of different flavors, I noted that the number of connections I have in different network differs strongly. One reason is that some network have a larger user base, others make it very hard to add connections, others imply a closeness of relationships that I do not want to share with everyone. So, what level of social relationships does being connected in one network imply?

Facebook

Nothing. It basically means "Hey you are on facebook as well!"

Xing, Plaxo Pulse and LinkedIn

You might be useful for my career, I better keep you in this network.

twitter, Last.fm, Flickr

What you do (listen to, or photograph) is interesting for me

del.icio.us and Digg

What you read and think is interesting for me

Dopplr and Plazes

If you happen to be in the same place with me, it would be nice to know so we can meet.

The most valuable network for me (apart from the address book synch of Plaxo) is del.icio.us, because it allows me to track and share ideas with people I find interesting and this is despite the poor network capabilities of del.icio.us. So if you would like to connect with me in del.icio.us, just leave a comment with your username,