I’ve become a fan of Ping.fm and its mass notification abilities.  However, I wanted to update my Ping.fm status without navigating away from the page I was on.  So I created the Ping.fm Mobile Sidebar for Firefox.

Much like my many other Firefox sidebars, it simply works as a shortcut to access the mobile version of a site.  This time it’s Ping.fm.

Yes, you could easily do this with a bookmark in Firefox, but I prefer to have an icon in my toolbar and a keyboard shortcut at my disposal.

I’m a big fan of Plurk, a micro blogging platform, that is often compared to Twitter.  It has basically taken me away from Twitter by fixing some of my big Twitter concerns.  The more I use Plurk, the more I realize how many limitations and issues Twitter currently has.

Here are a few reasons why I like Plurk better than Twitter:

1. Inline Replies - Keeping conversations together.  This really makes it feel like a community of users and not just a string posts.  In Twitter, when someone replied to a Tweet I put up yesterday, it was hard to follow the conversation.  Plurk however, keeps everything together.

I realized that the code I wrote for SocialAddict on Adobe Air could easily translate into a web application.  So I tossed the files up online and now it’s accessible everywhere.

Check it out: http://twistermc.com/s

What’s cool about this is you can use it in a few different ways.

1 - Use it without Adobe Air.

2 - Load it in Firefox’s sidebar.  Just visit the URL above, bookmark the page and be sure to check the ‘Load in Sidebar’ box.  Now whenever you click on the bookmark, it’ll pop-open.

After my recent success with Plurkit, I decided to take the idea to the next level and add in more social sites.  The outcome is SocialAddict which has 11 social sites within one Adobe Air application.

What SocialAddict does is loads the mobile or iPhone version of each site for easy access.  Again, I didn’t tie into any APIs or do massive re-construction.  These are all previously available applications that have been tied together to make it quick and easy to go from one to the next.

Within SocialAddict you’ll find:

• BrightKite
• Facebook
• FriendFeed To Go

I’ve been playing around with Aptana and Adobe Air to see if I could create a basic application.  What I created was Plurkit; an Adobe Air version of Plurk mobile.

Ok, I’ll be the first to admit, this is not as good as something like Twhirl. However, it is my first attempt at anything in Adobe Air so I’m pretty happy.

I didn’t use the Plurk API and do a lot of crazy coding.  All I did was take the mobile version of Plurk and embed it into an Adobe Air application.  And voila; Plurkit!

I’m now on Twitter and Tumblr and checking them out. I actually signed up for Twitter a long time ago, but never used it. It’s like IM only to a wider audience or so I understand. I don’t really see the point. However, I do have cool Firefox extension that makes Twittering soooo easy. Now I’m really checking it out and giving it a full test drive before giving up.

I’m also on Tumblr and quite enjoying that. It’s like a scrapbook where you can save sites, images, links and videos. Part blog part social bookmarking. Easy to use and I’m enjoying that. Every time I come across something cool in my feeds, I Tumble it for later.