Blogging Tips

Do you have so many social networking sites to keep up with that you often forget to update them all? Well, Zokem is here to help you keep all of your online profiles up-to-date. It lets you broadcast your own life and get real-time updates about what’s going on with your friends. You will need to create an account in order to link your Zokem account with all of your social networks. There are currently Zokem apps for: iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Nokia and Java enabled phones.

I am currently using Zokem from the iPhone/iPod Touch app. From it you can view a timeline with updates from yourself and your friends. You can also view a map with your location. Since I don’t have any friends yet, it’s not clear to me whether the map also shows the locations of my friends. You can also update your status – an obvious. The “what’s up” area shows notifications that you receive about your friends and social networks. For instance, I got a reply on Twitter and as well as getting a push notification, it’s also shown in the what’s up section.

Lastly there’s the settings – here you can choose to enable your location and/or popups. Also, you can choose the interval at which you’d like the Zokem timeline to update as well as choose how often you’d like to receive push notifications. Currently, push notifications can be sent in real-time, hourly, twice a day, daily or be totally disabled. There are more settings that can be customized via the actual website plus you can choose which items you’d like to see about your friends via your mobile device. You can also put your friends into groups, which can definitely come in handy if you have a lengthy list.

The social networking accounts that are currently supported by Zokem are Facebook (connected via Facebook connect), FriendFeed, MySpace, Twitter (connected via Twitter OAuth), Blogger, Fire Eagle, Friend and Last.fm. When adding social networks, you can customize each to show only the info that you choose – status updates, calls/sms, movements, profiles, music and travel info. You’ll also get a basic profile that will show your latest activities (according to your sharing preferences).

There’s an RSS feed section that will show you the RSS feed for each of your friends; this may come in handy for those that really want to stay updated on their friends’ daily activities. The web widget is a badge that shows your recent activity. The smaller badge only shows your public feed, while the larger badge shows your public feed and a map of your location (if you choose to share it). There is also a section called “manage widgets” which also looks like a start page by the way it’s setup. Here you can view your friend feed, map, see what’s nearby, see “what’s up”, view and add to your diary and view and add status updates.

I will admit, I’m not a fan of the site’s user interface – it is very rugged and I even caught a few typos. In my opinion, it is also a bit confusing trying to figure out what is what such as, what does sharing “profile” information mean and how do you share music? Plus, the location from my iPod Touch is not showing up correctly – I’ve never even been to Texas! Yet, I really love the idea of having a social networking personal assistant since I am an avid user of many different sites. So, this is a definite site that I’ll be keeping a close eye on.