OK, so I may have been to quick to judge Twitter, having never actually used it to much extent (bar creating an account). So, I’m giving it another shot.

If you’ve got a Twitter account, add me, my username is stylereactor
Show me some neat things you can do with it, and help me convince myself that it’s useful. I’ll of course be announcing my mundane experience in timely Tweets, as that seems to be the norm. 🙂

I’ll be the first to admit it, I just find Twitter irritating. There’s just something in me that doesn’t make me interested in hearing the mundane information about people’s lives. Especially when it’s fired at you at the rate of “Tweets”. Sure, it’s a fine concept, and it’s obviously caught on with some degree of success, but I’m simply not interested in that sort of thing.

I must confess, I did make a Twitter account, just to try the thing out. It lasted for all of 10 minutes. I just don’t know if any good things can come from a community which is centered around “ping” type updates, of little value.

And speaking of the “new wave” community sites, Virb is not my cup of tea either. I’m already a part of Myspace (just for my “real life” friends. I do have some :)), many forums, Digg, YouTube and actively comment on as many blogs as I can, and I think that’s just about enough. These days there are just so many social networks and groups to be a part of, and Virb (to me) is just one too many.

When I begin to think more deeply about it, I struggle to find any advantageous purpose for these social-networky sites. Sure, it’s great to have connections, but between LinkedIn, Myspace, Virb and Twitter (just to name a few of the more popular ones), we are really overly spoiled for choice. One minute you just *have* to be a part of Myspace, then weeks later, your friends are asking you to join Virb, what’s next? Each new network seems to be “Newer, Cooler and Better!”. There really should be one, single, definitive network that connects everyone in a balanced and generic way. Not thousands of sub-par networks which are populated and deserted on a whim. Fads come and go way too quickly, so the internet may not be the place for making meaningful and lifetime connections.

Call me old fashioned, but I’ll stick to my real life social networks. Even if I don’t have 5,212 friends.

I’ve been an avid user of Shaun Inman’s Mint since a little while after it’s initial public release, and have been altogether pleased with it’s stat-tracking abilities and clean aesthetic.

But there’s a new kid on the block, and it’s been seducing me with an almost similar minty-green flair ever since I realized I still had a beta invite lying around. It’s called reinvigorate.

Being a hosted stats package, reinvigorate works in a slightly different manner to Mint, your stats are calculated and displayed on a remote server, which provides a great looking page filled with pretty pie charts, bar graphs and all the raw data to fuel blogger’s egomania. reinvigorate is currently free of charge, and with Mint priced at $30 per license, this may be it’s biggest advantage.

There’s no denying that both packages offer a beautiful interface, and both will be more than adequate for the average user’s needs, but my preference still lies with Mint. It’s level of customizability, plugin architecture and the fact that it’s hosted on my own server make it the most useful statistics package to date.

That said, I do prefer reinvigorate’s design to Mint’s, I just love the beautiful graphs and charts it renders, as well as the cool tabbed interface.

Silktide‘s well known Sitescore version 2 has recently been exhibited as an invite-only beta.

The online tool is used to analyze and score websites from a host of different methods, and is an invaluable tool for examining usability and SEO status.

Along with a brand new and down-right sexy design facelift, the behind the scenes score generating process has undergone some major changes, and according to Silktide, will now be more accurate and balanced.

Unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to try it out, although I am thoroughly looking forward to it’s open release in the very near future.

Check it out at Sitescore.org

(Image courtesy of sitescore.org)