Facebook became what others could have become, a rich platform and network for modular appliances—small focused applications. Facebook, however, adopts the walled garden approach, akin to Myspace, and works poorly with open architectures and protocols. Those not in verified college, workplace, and organization networks are limited to one regional geographical network.

Whether some stories truly need condensing editing to 1000 characters, or suffer it tolerably, Clipmarks can excerpt and share only that, though it allows another 1000 for commentary and numerous additional pictures, each worth maybe a thousand words. In addition to viral appeal in way of a Facebook app, the new Clipcast interface looks and works like a widget, perhaps to target mobile users. For this category, a thousand character summary of a page would then seem ideal! Linkmarking, indexed from terse to featureful, might go Reddit, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Yahoo, MyWeb, Clipmarks, Ma.gnolia, Faves (Blue Dot), Tumblr, and Google Reader Shared items.

An amazingly expressive collaborative calendar, in Eventful events can include sub-events and related events in sophisticated relationships. It distinguishes between calendars and groups—which have members and discussions. It also supports microformats, syndication, to feed calendars, feed readers, other applications and browsers.

A rich and expressive collaborative calendar now integrated with Yahoo for easier logins and also as a Facebook application, Upcoming reaches out to your friends to share events. It also automatically incorporates tagged photos from Flickr, and offers both Yahoo and Google custom roadmaps. For events already affixed in time and place, a collaborative calendar beats round robins of mail.

Oriented towards news and journalism, Newsvine features originals stories and linkmarks to stories. As a cofounder with Wired Magazine and the New York University School of Journalism, it also participates in Assignment Zero, a crowdsourced journalism experiment.

Unlike other photo-sharing sites, Tabblo lets photographers juxtapose pictures and express elegant graphic visions in complex tableaus. This supports story telling better, while also keeping photos in full resolution for printing. I share the majority of mine here only with subjects and friends.

An amazingly full-featured and flexible photo sharing site, Flickr has become the buzz for photography on the Web. It boasts one of the most interesting collaborative filters for photography, http://flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ —be sure to see it. My stream includes selected works linking elsewhere.

Like Wikipedia, the Rochester wiki invites everyone to contribute. It has quickly become one of Rochester's top sites, though not without adverse effects. Trolls abound. Editors have no clue about libel. Egotism run rampant—so much against the grain of wikis. My page tallies my edits and contributions.

Yahoo has released, and also bought many often internally competing, projects that have failed to gain popular following. Though MyWeb 2.0, a revamp still in beta, has rich features, it lacks such popularity. Among a dozen linkmarking sites, i use it to annotate and share pages with groups and services already with users at Yahoo, such as my Yahoogroups.

A collaborative filter and mediated social network for sharing and learning about music and concerts, Last.fm taps into and shares my iTunes playlists. Its calendar lists interesting shows and ones i plan to attend. Last.fm events also draw tagged photos from Flickr.

…plus sojourners and villains. I had originally registered with LiveJournal to comment on friends blogs and to post in the Rochester community. Of course, it remains an informative and venerated site.

By the folks at Six Apart, creator of Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal, Vox emphasizes visual design and graphity. Though Vox hosts photos, albums, and collections, it can also import photos from other services in complement. (described by TechCrunch)

Formerly Zaadz, Gaia combines intentional community, social and green enterprise, and conscious capitalism to foster a spirituality and vibe that encourages and enables its members to act and accomplish. Groups embrace ancient concepts, from organic farming and community to spirituality and literacy, and modern concepts, from sustainability and nutrition to social capital theory and economics. It links Amazon items and features a business directory.

A darling of the San Francisco counterculture and contender for a new generation venue after the Well, Tribe remains one of the most useful social networking sites, one of two i use which can collapse degrees of separation into a flat view. It features a profile, an album, blog, testaments, friends, tribes, recommendations, requests, events & listings, and feeds: Eventful, BlueDot, Claim ID, and Amazon.

I wrote this back in 1999, when i invited friends to Park Ave Holiday Open Houses by e mail.