Because there has been a real danger of having this blog mistaken for the Unofficial Yahoo Weblog of late, I've got to change the subject. That subject, and my new obsession in my thin margin of "spare" time (when does time become "spare"? It's like an "extra" cigarette... do they really exist?), is World of Warcraft. Yes, I went in with the noblest of intentions - research, pure, research - but I've been sucked in because you know what? This is what I've been craving from social software. WoW is a vast and startlingly real social metaverse I am exceedingly eager to spend time in. You can choose primarily solo play and certainly many do, but there are a number of quests and aspects of the game than can only be experienced socially, in groups with other players. And the most fun I've had is in banding together with guildmates and randomly encountered players, many of whom are more than eager to trade help on your quests for help with theirs (or who think nothing of offering no strings attached help).

There is always something deliciously unexpected going on around every turn, from spontaneous offerings of help from very high-level players who have almost nothing to gain in terms of game stats from helping you out, to curious and bizarre creatures (the trippy multi-colored Murlocs on the coast of Westfall I encountered last night come to mind), to middle of night %uFFFDcatch%uFFFD games instigated for no other reason than someone bought some throwing balls and wanted to infect other players with fun.

I was delighted by this thread on WoW Insider about families and extended friend families who play WoW together. And I%uFFFDve been psyched to start to share WoW lore and game discussions with some of my fellow WIN bloggers who play. The game captures the essence of something I%uFFFDve been craving more of from SocialSoftwareLandia %uFFFD actual shared experience, and the ability to really work together from within the software %uFFFD not merely using the software as a means to organize work that actually gets done elsewhere (groupware comes to mind). The realtime aspect is also extremely powerful. Nor is something like WoW any longer limited in appeal to mostly geeks or experienced gamers %uFFFD the interface is incredibly easy to use, and there are diverse aspects to the game that will appeal to anyone seeking engaging entertainment. It%uFFFDs also incredibly viral, as evidenced by some of the comments in the thread. MMOs are already huge in gaming circles (and huge in Asia to an extent they%uFFFDre not yet huge here), but I have no doubt they%uFFFDre poised to bust right on out over here in WesternLandia. And if you%uFFFDre a player, say hello to a gnome rogue named Brogotheum if you see him. :)

Alright, so I'm fascinated with lists lately (which is timely as OPML seems to be the Flickr of document standards these days). I'm also curious to know what social services folks are actually using the most, beyond whatever is the latest hot company we're talking about on the blawgs. So, in light of both of these things, I'm kicking off an informal poll: what are your top five favorite social software services currently in use? I'll start:

1. (drumroll, please)... Flickr. Shocking, I know.

2. del.icio.us

3. My Web 2.0 - I tend to store everything in My Web 2.0 and only a subset of things to del.icio.us, but I use both frequently to find cool stuff.

4. Memeorandum - when I need news fast, which is all the time, this is what I use.

5. YouTube is emerging as a new favorite. I like that I can so easily embed video on my own blogs.

A nice solid honorable mention goes to last.fm which is dutifully logging what my media server is playing even when I'm not hanging out on the site finding new music.

Aight, peeps, I'm passing the mic - what are your top 5 faves?

We had done a successful "How would you change..." feature series over on Engadget that TUAW also recently took up with the "You're in charge..." series. The idea is, pick a gadget/application/web service and create a massively multiplayer wishlist for that thing. Seems like this could work well in SocialSoftwareLandia, so let's see how it goes - How would you change Flickr? I'll start with a few, then please throw your wishlist into the comments...

• Local interestingness - see the most interesting photos only from my contacts / friends / family.

• Interestingness reverse lookup - when viewing one of my photos, I want a way to find out how "interesting" it is - is it in my top 200? Is it #437? How interesting (or not...) is it for this day on Flickr?

• I often wish I could collect other people's photos into sets.

• Some more elegant way to keep track of the 290 groups I'm in... maybe some sort of dashboard page I could drop a few groups into at a time and just monitor several at any one time.

Tag... you're it! How would you change Flickr?

Think of all the time I wasted quibbling about the difference between social software and Web 2.0, when I could have been using the Web 2.0 validator to tell me what makes the web two point oh cut and what doesn't?

[Thx, Judith!]

Wow, pretty sweet - Yahoo is integrating blog search with their news search, as well as adding Flickr photos and My Web 2.0 results into the mix. This brings together user-created and mainstream media in a way that's unprecedented, totally beating Google to the punch on this one as well as leveraging the goodness of both Flickr and My Web 2.0. From the announcement, we should expecting yet further integration of community created content (podcasts, e.g.) in the future.

The index only includes a subset of the larger blogosphere (those that are included in the My Yahoo feed directory), but will grow to ideally include everything from the blo.gs ping stream. The interface doesn't quite put blogs on equal footing visually - they're off in a sidebar while the regular news search results are in the main pane - but I actually sort of like the way this is done. It's not going to alienate mainstream users who want to stick with their traditional MSM sources, but will provide a still visible alternative. Social software nerds (raising hand), bloggers, and others already kicking back with their second (or fifth...) cocktail in the cluetrain dining car can just click on through to the interface that shows blog search results in the main pane and Flickr results in the sidebar at right (here's an example search on Web 2.0). I dig it. For once, I only have one small request - I want a way to make the blog news search interface my default for news search, so I don't have to click through each time (with option to click through the the mainstream search results).

It only seems logical there would be a collaborative effort to add a folksonomy component to world mapping - enter Tagzania. Whereas 43places is more travel-oriented, focused on photos and user experience and stories of places, Tagzania makes use of the Google maps API to actually add tags to the maps themselves - so you can set a waypoint and tag it up. Each waypoint then becomes a "page" with an RSS feed, to track what other users add over time. All content submitted becomes open content under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

[Via Smartmobs]

As a travel buff, I'm digging on the new 43places social travel site, done by the 43things Robot Co-op folks. It's yet another Ruby on Rails site, cleanly designed and easy to use, and has the potential to become quite addictive. You can specify the places on your travel wishlist and find out what others have said about those locations, as well as flag the places you've been and rate them, relate an experience, and upload photos. There's also a - bless them - folksonomy component for tagging places, and a whole myriad of ways to find people you might want to connect with - because they're geographically close to you, they live in the places you want to go, or they want to go to the same places you do. Another way cool feature is that if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them with place names and use a Creative Commons license, 43places will pick them up via the magic that is web services. Now if you'll pardon me, I'm off to keep procrastinating feeding my wanderlust. See you in Tibet!