The Emperor may be wearing underwear

I'm a bit techie. Techie enough to be able to break things very thoroughly though not techie enough to actually fix them. So I get excited about the new buzz on the web and I play with it for about five seconds before getting bored and moving onto the new shiny thing.

And then I have to go back to the buzz and get to understand it so that I can make a sensible assessment of how useful it will be to my clients. So I have been back on twitter and tracking the many enthusiastic threads about how the statusphere will replace the blogosphere. And through it all I have found myself thinking "The Emperor has no clothes". It's fun, it's shiny but there is little to it.

Tweetdeck makes it more useful and so the fact that capital has been injected into future tweetdeck development made me sit up and take notice and the first development since that happy announcement is the integration with facebook connect.

Now I don't want to bore the many readers of this blog who are in it largely for the pictures of the dogs and criticism of RSPCA media relations but let us just gently touch on why this is interesting.

Tweetdeck allows you to group tweets and track a wide range of conversations on twitter in a simple and useful way. Facebook connect allows sites outside facebook the chance to share information with a user's facebook profile. Bring them together and I can now see what my facebook friends are saying on their status updates alongside those I'm following on twitter.

Which is nice.

Of itself this is not a world-shaking development but I think it does hint at a future where twitter is more fully integrated into other social networks and that might make it properly useful.

So the emperor may,in fact, be clothed (though only slightly).

And if anyone offers you shares in tweetdeck, I'd consider them very seriously.

Image is Monster TweetDeckby marksdk used under CC-SA-2.0