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With all the social networks on the web today, it is very easy to become overwhelmed by them all.  I have accounts with most of them, and I am most active with the same top three that most of my readers are: Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace.  All these services have a feature called status, to which you constantly update to tell the world what you doing, reading, thinking, seeing, feeling, promoting, wishing for, etc.  Since so many of us have so many accounts, various developers have created a barrage of service updater applications to aggregate and push out information.  Up until recently, I have been very big on Tweet Deck, but I now find myself using the web more and more instead.

Tweet Deck is one of the largest updaters on the market.  With this Adobe Air based application, I can keep track of multiple accounts in Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.  I can even stay up to date with my seldom used LinkedIn profile.  I can do most everything on Tweet Deck that I can do in each respective service too.  However, there are problems.  The Adobe Air platform is sluggish.  I don’t get the updates in true real time, I don’t view aspects of each post the same way that the source developers had intended, and overall I feel a tad alienated from the experience.  I can see how useful a service like Tweet Deck, or HootSuite, or Seesmic can be for someone that is using social networking as a business model, but for me, I find that the only thing I use them for is to update all my profiles at one time.

For that, I am turning to Ping.fm.  That’s exactly what it is for. Updating. That is all I care about.  For the rest of my social networking experience, I turn to the host service itself.

What do you think?  What services do you use?  What do you think about the third party applications vs. the service’s main website?  Tell me what you think and post bellow.