I haven't gotten into twitter-style microblogging yet, and one of the reasons is that there are too many overlapping services. I opened a twitter account a year ago, use facebook occasionally, have gmail open constantly, and have friends who frequent just one or two of those. When I feel like sharing a link or a thought with the world at large, I tend to choose one of the three quite arbitrarily and that just seems unfair.The problem is solved, though.
Ping.fm integrates status messages across facebook, twitter, gtalk and frighteningly many others that I know nothing about. There's a clean mobile and iphone interface, email access, a gtalk bot, and easy ways to target updates to a subset of your status platforms.
Ubiquity is extremely useful on its own (for reasons I won't detail now), and the ping.fm ubiquity command allows command line updates from firefox very gracefully. Crazy handy.
Justifying the utility of status updates in general, however, I'm still working on. One possibility: contributing to real-time data. It's sort of appealing.
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