Then I bought a Diana Camera this year – a quirky, plastic, “toy camera” that’s been a lot of fun and taught me a lot about patience in my instant-gratification life. But still, not so much my everyday companion.

I love my iPhone – and I’m an AppStore addict – so I constantly download, add (and subtract) applications, and was so excited to find an app called “ToyCamera”.

ToyCamera takes the kind of quirky, light-leaks filled pictures that I get with my Diana, without the wait for photo development. I think the developer, Takayuki Fukatsu, is an amazing talent, and has created an app that surprises you with every shot. The filters included in this app include:

• Vintage Green effect
• Vintage Yellow effect
• Vintage Warm effect
• Low Saturation
• High Saturation
• Toning Sepia
• Black and White
• HiCon Black and White

It also has an uploader to the BigCanvas Photoshare – which I don’t use – as well as a Flickr group.

This month I’ve made a commitment to take 5 pictures of wherever I am each morning and post them to Flickr, no matter how I feel they turn out. You can follow my progress here (and this one is my favorite so far). Takayuki Fukatsu has also made a couple of other fantastic apps, OldCamera (Black and White pictures), SepiaCamera (just as it sounds) and QuadCamera, a really neat effect that takes 4 quick pics and puts them in a number of different ways, stacked, side-by-side, etc. All of them are just as addictive as ToyCamera.

To upload to Flickr, I’ve been using the application by XK72, Mobile Fotos. Mobile Fotos allows you to view photostreams, favorites, tags, sets and groups, as well as search for photos, read and make comments, or see other Flickr members photos.And of course the easy uploader – I can upload to groups as well as my photostream.

Since this is a relatively new passion, I’ll see if this sticks beyond my alloted commitment. But it feels like it will. And I’m looking forward to seeing it in action at the next conferences I’m at.

Are there other apps I should check out? Any tutorials? Let me know.

Update 1.24: Just released – an online companion to QuadCamera, QuadAnimator, which takes your QC pictures and saves it as an animated GIF file.  Fun!

Oh Phil Collins, you balding seer of online social networking.  How could you have possibly known that thirty years after Genesis released …And Then There Were Three… a band of raging Twitterati would be anguishing over who to twit and who to qwit? OK — technically speaking, Mike Rutherford wrote the lyrics to “Follow You Follow Me” and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking of Twitter, but I’ve got a soft spot for bald guys (or a bald spot for soft guys) so I hope you’ll let me off easy…Greg Verdino: Marketing, Media & Trends, Dec 2008

You should read the whole article. He goes on to talk about who he follows on Twitter and why. I’m always interested in people’s “Twitter Philosophies” (for lack of a more pretentious term) and I love seeing the rational behind who gets follow’d back – so how do YOU decide?

I don’t have a set criteria – I look at people’s profiles and tweets and try to see why they wanted to connect with me. Or if they bring the funny.

And as for Greg, well – was Genesis REALLY Genesis after Peter Gabriel left??

Acccording to the SixApart announcement, the incredible Leah Culver and Mike Malone are joining the SA engineering team (I see that as hugely important as the annoucement last week that Rael Dornfest is joining the Twitter team). Huge coup for 6A. Many people are taking that to mean that Pownce will be absorbed into the SixApart universe in some fashion, but I don’t think so. Too many microblogging platforms exist, all of which can be imported into any platform – why have another? Especially when there are so many features that I can see this team producing, adding immediate value to 6A – especially to TypePad!

It seems that Pownce Pro users will get their own free TypePad account for a year and that Powncers are able to export their posts and can then import them to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.

Thanks to the Pownce Team for all of their work and a platform that I think might have been slightly aheaad of its time – I’m looking forward to seeing where SixApart goes from here.

What it is to me – I’ve been using Twitter for almost 2 years, and as I’ve said I’ve been on long enough to fall in love and out of love and back in love with it. Now 2x over. I also wrote a response to a Brian Solis post about how disappointed I was in their handling of certain seeming violations in their Terms of Service. Then I felt guilt about piling on without knowing both sides of the story.

Twitter was – almost – the first (anyone remember Dodgeball?) and despite scaling issues have done it better than anyone else. Jaiku is pretty much done (Is Google the place where Web 2.0 apps go to die? Jaiku? Delicious? Dodgeball?) with no movement since the acquisition. But now there are new option seemingly every day, Plurk, identi.ca and Posterous among them. FriendFeed is a big favorite among early adopters, with the opportunity to have longer conversations and comments for each of you and your friends items.

There are also push services, like Ping.fm and BlogIt, which can push status updates and blog posts to a number of services at the same time. Personally, I feel weird about that. I have many “friends” across the different services and it feels like I’m spamming them instead of concentrating on delivering unique content. My issues, not yours

Twitter (and Facebook) is where the my conversations are and where I’ve met people who have become personally important to me. There are talented people, who I’ll never meet, who I look at their Twitter pages each day. I’ve had job interviews and opportunities because of Twitter and have met a ton of smart people who I now count as friends (or collegues). I check in to FriendFeed, I look at the other services I’m on – but those are appointment check-ins, not integrated into my daily workflow.

In fact – I still can’t get excited about Plurk – and I know plenty of people who are. I just can’t get past the interface (again, my issue!) and the whole karma point system makes no sense to me. Many of my connections love it and I plan on checking in every once in a while – it’s just not for me. On the other hand, I’m enjoying Posterous and the simplicity of emailing all of my updates, pictures, etc. It’s easy and fast.

Do the Twitter down times disturb me? More of a gentle to general state of annoyance. Do I wish they would set their business model? Uh, yeah (I’m sure they can’t wait to do that too). But I love the service and the team – both of which have changed the daily way I communicate with the world. And have brought me opportunities and people in my life that I would have never had before Twitter.

(And BTW – it’s still FREE!).

My Plurk Page

Plurk has a very visual timeline that also tracks the comments in real time (the unread comments show up in your browser tab in FireFox). Right now, there’s no way to differentiate comments to your plurks or your friends without actually clicking on the “Show all” link.

They also track interaction by awarding karma points (from the website):

“Every plurker has his/her own karma value. It is recalculated every day and falls within these intervals:

• c60900;">0.00 to 21.00: You are in the state of creation
• ffa200;">21.00 to 41.00: You are in the state of maintenance
• f4cf00;">41.00 to 61.00: You are enlightened
• 0018ff;">61.00 to 81.00: You are so close to Plurk Nirvana
• 00ff24;">81.00 to 100.00: You have reached Plurk Nirvana!

Your karma score is directly influenced by your and your friends Plurk activity. The more active you are, the more points you’ll get. Using various features of Plurk such as instant messaging or uploading a profile image will also help.

Invite your real friends to boost your karma!”

It’s weird that you can’t fill out your profile with a description (250 characters) without reaching 40 karma points.

There are growing pains – I’ve already gotten a couple of database errors and I was unable to use any of the “Find a Friend” tools. But there are a couple of things I like – the “Alert” feature makes it easy to see who friends you (or accepted your requests) and there’s a group feature – “Cliques” – which has always been a missing Twitter feature for me.

It’s fun to try out, but the true test is how easily it folds into my workflow. I do like that Plurk is supported by Profilactic (which feeds my Lifestream page) and a number of people that I follow are already trying it out. As the service (and my use of it) grows, I’ll post my updated impressions.

Please feel free to friend me on Plurk.

UPDATE: Interesting Reading:

Plurk: Our Philosophy in a Walnut Shell

Sean Percival – Plurk: Timeline Based Microblogging