Well, my obsession with Twitter has been pretty well satisfied by now.

I’ve gotten the feed printed onto my desktop with Geektool, set up keyword tracking, followed a bunch of super cool journalism people, then meticulously tracked down every Twitter user in Gainesville and followed them as well. (Now that I’m leaving, should I un-follow them?) My tweets automagically go through to my Facebook status and I even set up my calendar and to do list on Twitter.

I use a combination of Twhirl, Google Talk and mobile updates to keep track of everything. And no, I’m not paying attention ALL the time.

I made a Twitter account for The Independent Florida Alligator and then made a page on the Web site where the “tweets” of those that follow the newspaper’s account will show up. The Alligator’s Twitter feed also includes weather conditions and updates from the University Police Department’s crime log (scraped with Dapper).

My initial obsession has been tempered by productivity problems and information overload. But I won’t stop using it. I’ll just have to be a little more judicious.

As far as web geeks go, I may be a little anti-social. I visit Facebook once a week, at most. I don’t even bother with Myspace anymore unless someone else calls my attention there. I don’t have many photos to post to Flickr, I don’t usually recommend links via Del.icio.us (mostly because the people I’m networked with usually beat me to the link), Digg is no longer even an RSS feed and I post to Twitter only once every few days.

But I maintain these connections, cause you just never know.

For example, I’m a “twitter-follower” of the NYT. I get instant messages with links to new stories. I’ve found that this means I actually read them, instead of skipping over the headline and lede in Google Reader.

Last week, the Orlando Sentinel made an account with Twitter, and used it to track and update the launching of Atlantis. The best part is, they didn’t just “tweet” shuttle-related updates.

“Fours hours until launch and all anyone is talking about is Paris Hilton’s meltdown in court and her return to jail. Sigh.”

So having resisted Twitter, finally given in, and being a lukewarm user at best, why does this rock my socks?

Because I wasn’t within reach of TV or computer on Friday. I got those updates as text messages on my phone. And being addicted to being in the know, that just made my day.

The lesson here is that some weird and funky things take off in the online world. News outlets should join in the fun.

MySpace may be a super popular social networking site, but I wasn’t worried when they released MySpace News. I find MySpace to be very shallow and I only have a few friends that use it regularly. As part of their target demographic, I’m not impressed.

So it was no surprise to me when the reports started coming in that their Digg-like news feature flopped.

But the front page of MySpace news shows most stories with zero votes. Two stories have a single vote. None have more than that. Perusing through the various categories shows the same thing - page after page of stories with no votes or other evidence that anyone is visiting the site.

Is this the result of a lack of promotion on the part of MySpace? Or lack of motivation on the part of the users?

Fortuitous gives us seven tips for managing a successful community.

• Take emotion out of decisions.
• Talk like a human, not a robot.
• Give people something they can be proud of.
• Bring users in during community decisions.
• Moderation is a full-time job.
• Metrics spread the work out.
• Guidelines not rules.

Check out the post for a detailed explanation of each.

As a forum moderator and blogger myself, I agree with each of these as important ways to keep any online community healthy and happy. I haven’t had any trouble yet, either here (thanks to Akismet catching all the lovely spam comments) or on the forum I moderate. (I wonder if GTD cuts down on forum trolling, or if I’ve just been lucky.)

I think one of the keys to keeping members of a community happy is to guide conversations. Ask relevant questions and respond to posts with carefully thought-out posts of your own. I think this either prevent the endless opinion war, or else makes harassment obvious enough that no one will blame you for banning a troll.

I finally found a community portal branded to the city rather than a company. DigPhilly looks like a great editorial staff provides a lot of content and news, plus users can import RSS feeds, load photos, videos, multimedia, classifieds, blog posts and calendars. You can even shop from the site.

The design is pretty cool too, with some creative navigation and colors, and I’m definitely diggin’ the skyline. Just tell me where I can get a philly cheesesteak mailed to me, piping hot and oozing Cheese Whiz, and I’m good.

Facebook recently released free local classifieds, also known as Facebook Marketplace. The interface could be a little cleaner, but it’s no worse than Craigslist…no telling how this will effect the classifieds industry. I use a combination of Craigslist and LiveJournal to get things for free or cheap. Facebook is extremely popular among college students as a social networking site, but will they post ads? Depending on the reaction, I’ll have to add Facebook to my “I hate being broke” browsing.

A Craigslist and Google Maps mashup called Mapskrieg shows exactly where Craigslist housing listings are located. In some cases, you could probably get a great satellite view of the area. I poked around Gainesville and Miami (my hometown), and sent the link to some friends who are looking for a change of residence. Looks like a really useful tool.

I know the Gainesville Sun and the Independent Florida Alligator both carry classifieds online. The Sun’s are a searchable database, while the Alligator provides a .pdf due to limited resources. It doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to grab data from Craigslist and other popular online ad sites and create a ginormous pile of ads. Mix it with Google Maps. Make it easy to search. Give it a feed. Give it to us for free, we’re gonna get it anyway, we might as well be spending time on your site.

From xkcd

According to Mashable, Facebook is looking to to launch a local classifieds service targeting poor college students.

The idea is that it would be free to list items within your network, but you’d have to pay to post an item in other networks.

Facebook is already trying to be the new Twitter. The buzz about Facebook looking to buy Twitter died this weekend when Facebook updated their “status” feature, allowing users to update and check status via text messages, as well as providing a site and a feed for your friend’s statuses.