Social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have been popular for a couple of years now. But lately, a new breed of social networking is on the rise – mobile social networks. Mobile social networks allow you to use your mobile device to communicate with your friends while on the go. Some of the bigger names at the moment are Twitter and Blue Pulse. In my neck of the woods, I’ve been hearing about Twitter. Out of curiosity, I’m taking the opportunity to learn more about it.

The way Twitter works is that you login to the site, and leave short, “blurb-type” messages about what you’re doing at the moment. Then people who follow you receive these messages in their account. The more followers you have, the more people know what you’re doing. You too can follow people. It’s only fair, after all. If you register your phone or IM with them, you can also use that to post your messages. This is where things get interesting. I can use the shortcode for twitter to send the system a number of commands. For instance, you could turn off the updates you get from other people temporarily. This is great example of a mobile application that takes the context of the user into consideration.

I’d be interested in talking with a developer from Twitter or any other mobile social network to discuss the opportunities and challenges of building the app, particularly the interaction with SMS. So I have a few questions for you, the reader. Do mobile social networks interest you? What is your favorite, and why? In your experience, have they enhanced your relationships?

The night before last I attended my first, but definitely not last, Refresh Seattle event. Refresh Seattle according to it’s home page is “a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in the Seattle/Puget Sound area”. Another way to say it is an opportunity to meet some fellow web professionals who happen to be a group of smart and cool people. The evening started with the speaker Kevin Stewart who’s an Engineering Manager at Adobe Systems. He presented to the group about his experiences and perspective on leading a team of software developers. At the moment, I don’t have experience leading a team of developers, so it was interesting for me to be exposed to this topic. I’m sure when it’s my turn to take the helm of a team, I’ll think back to this and say “So that’s what he’s talking about!”.

I met a number of people afterward at Dad Watsons, a bar in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. It’s a very short walk from the Refresh Seattle meeting site. A couple of these people are Craig Saila and Jeff Croft. Jeff has the distinction of not only being a web standards guru, but more importantly he brought a nice camera! He snapped several photos of people, including myself .

I’m already looking forward to the next one.

It was cold morning, even with the sun shining. I was feeling the morning chill, even with 2 tshirts. I arrived at Seattle Center by cab. There were 15,500 participants. If you include the non-registered runners and the crowd, there were probably over 20,000 people. It was exciting to see so many people.

The majority of the course was the along the Hwy 99 northbound lanes. The runners were traveling south. That’s right, we were running the wrong way! We like to do things a little different here is Seattle. This provided the runners with an outstanding view of the Puget Sound and Qwest Field, our destination.

I had a goal for this event. My goal was to do the entire course (3.58 miles/ 5.77 km) without walking. I’m happy to report that I accomplished my goal. As a result, I finished with a time of 38:01. That is a 10.6 minute mile average speed. I look forward to the opportunity to beat this next time.

Over the weekend, I went out walking around downtown Seattle. During a session at the Local Color coffee shop at Pike’s Market, I discovered two very cool mobile websites – Yelp and EarthComber.

Yelp is great because it lets you discover restaurants, nightlife, and any other service that might interest you, as well as feedback from other users. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of Yelp, but it is the first time I realized they had a mobile site. If you’ve never been to Seattle, it’s divided into neighborhoods (Belltown, Downtown, Capitol Hill, etc…). So it’s nice when you’re given the option of filtering your search results by neighborhood. I did a search for “pizza” near “Pine St and 8th ave, seattle, wa”. When I filtered the results by neighborhood using “Capitol Hill”, it shows my favorite pizza place Hot Mama’s in the number 2 slot! Very cool.

Another site that’s great is EarthComber. Their mobile site looks fantastic on my Treo. They have a fair amount of overlap with yelp (search by topic, ratings, user comments), but they have some additional functionality. One of the great promises of mobile applications is Location Based Services. They’ve taken a step in the right direction. When you have a friend in your list, and you’re both members, you can see on a map where they are in relation to you. I say its a step in the right direction because each person is still responsible for updating the location. In a true LBS application, your phone location would be known already by the system. With that said, it’s still really cool. Another nice feature is that you can save your location information. So as you revisit places, you won’t need to re-enter everything. Just select it from a list. They do have an option, where you can set the location on the map by using your internet connections’ IP address. I haven’t had accurate results with this, but it maybe enough to get you close enough. I’ll have to try again in a few weeks. Maybe it’ll be better, who knows.

On March 16, 2008, I’ll be participating in the Henry Weinhard’s St. Patrick’s Day Dash for my first time. I signed up 2 weeks ago, while I was doing some contracting at Ascentium. I look forward to the challenge of completing the 3.5 mile (5.6 km) run. To prepare, I’m using the treadmill in my apartment building and running around Greenlake. If you live near Seattle, I encourage you to participate.