I find myself updating my status, or answering the question "what are you doing?" across Twitter, Jaiku, Plazes and Facebook. This is made easier through clients like Twitterific, Juhu, Plazer and some Facebook hacks that are less attractive. I'm using these clients for more than updating status easily, however. They are a new kind of attention aggregator -- bringing the status or lifestreams of my social networks to me in real time.
They are pretty cool tools, if you haven't tried them. For Twitter, having a client fits my laptop-oriented daily use, so I can mostly turn the mobile client off (text "off" to 40404, and "on" when you are roaming around) and subscribe to a larger social network. For Jaiku, having a client brings continuous partial presence to my laptop, that is far richer because people are lifestreaming (adding feeds from other tools like blogs to enrich their presence). For Plazes, the Plazer has always let me share my location, but now it is richer with status sharing and a reverse-chronological view of your network. Facebook will surely have a better client soon as part of their quest to be the social operating system, and hopefully incorporate your Mini-feed.
But all this client development seems like one-offs, status service providers have stayed out of development perhaps wisely, and there is ample room for innovation. As is usually the case, we've been here before -- a lack of standardization and cooperation yields less and leaves room for a large service provider to monopolize.
I don't think we want to wait for Google, Yahoo or Microsoft to provide a status and lifestream integrated user experience that flows through clients, let alone browsers or operating systems. I do think this will happen as status services fill a valuable niche in our demand for social interaction, let alone being a new command line for web services.
Compare where we are to how RSS and Atom provided common standards for developers to innovate. There was a time where almost every graduate CS student would write a news aggregator for fun and new startups proliferated. Adriaan Tijsseling leveraged Atom from the earliest versions to create client blog editor, Ecto, and went beyond the Flickr Uploader to also offer aggregation with 1001. Some, like Newsgator, plunged deep into clients across operating systems, email clients and mobile clients to let you work across them. But the result isn't the case where one vendor, could own publishing, syndication and reading including clients. We have a healthy marketecture that continues to innovate.
There is a new kind of aggregator, for more real time attention, that needs to be build to work across status services. I'm not sure if it will be built into existing news aggregators, if existing status clients will evolve into them, or it will be something new. I just know it is coming. It will leverage status service providers and Lifestreaming you find in services like Dandelife and Jaiku. You will be able to edit your status and perhaps more, like location to Plazes or a blog entry. Maybe it will be built on Apollo or Google Gears, maybe a Firefox extension or a mobile version on WidSets. But it won't happen too soon.
The problem is, while the REST APIs are easy to work with, they aren't standardizing. Maybe they will converge on using the Atom Publishing Protocol. Maybe they can work out a way to let you write your status once, publish everywhere, and remove dupes when aggregating.
