I have never truly been a fan of anything Joss Whedon put out, mostly because I just never got started on things, and by the time everyone was having their fanboygasms about the shows, they were well into their arcs or … off the air and not yet released on DVD. So I never got into Buffy, Angel or Firefly and I still ain’t seen Serenity. What I’ve heard about his new show doesn’t particularly interest me, nor was I impressed by his writing stints on various comic titles. Though I do admit to being impressed by him letting the Buffy/Angel comic books be official canon and continuity for the now off-the-air series.

Just about every site has been linking to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day (from that fantastic and surreal Cheetos commercial). It’s not really sing-along, unless you’ve watched it a million times to know the words, there ain’t no bouncing ball, but it’s very funny. Norman watched it through before me and he suggested that a line from this scene would be his new quote:

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It’s in three acts, all online until midnight Sunday July 20, also available on iTunes right now. After it goes offline, it will be coming out as a DVD and there will be details about the DVD at Comic Con. One of these years I’m going to have to make it out there for that… and Pride, of course.

When I used to play the RPG Vampire the Masquerade in both tabletop and LARP forms, there was a vampiric ability called Presence. It allowed the user to influence the emotions and actions of others. In terms of social networking, it might have been nicknamed the drama power. To this day, I still believe it actually exists on LiveJournal. Probably reaching back to the date when “friend” overcame “befriend” as the popular verb form and it’s opposite “unfriend” gained even more use in day to day language.

Web 2.0/Social Networking provides us a different type of Presence though, the ability to appear omnipresent in a way. But it can also send very confusing signals about one’s activities, location, online attention span, etc. I signed up for ping.fm which is a service that can send a status message, microblog (140 characters) or an actual blog post to many different services. Effectively it updates your status/messages on all services at once. I still can’t tell whether this is a good thing or just annoying, since if people are following you on those many services, they’re pretty much getting spammed when you send a multi-update, especially those using SMS notifications.

Other services strive to act as the lighthouse in the Marvel title Excalibur which exists simultaneously across the multiverse. They will update your actual profile information across multiple services so that you remain the same on facebook, myspace, hi5, etc. While I think that would be a great way to keep your online social (friendly) and networking (work-related) profiles in line, I usually keep most of mine pared down to the basics anyway.

The most popular of them all, I think, are the multi-account instant messenger clients like Adium (my fave at home) and meebo (my fave at work). I think these are great. One application, all your chat buddies, click a button and your away/present status is set for all services.

Unfortunately… read on to see how these apps also foster abuse…