The app is one of the most visually appealing apps I’ve come across, and it almost feels like you’re playing when you use it.

However, for me to use it as much as I would like (I’d love for it to be my ‘social journal’, which is also what the team behind it are calling it) I miss some integration with other apps and services. Let me give you some examples:

• Sleep/awake – Path let’s you tell others when you are sleeping and when you are awake. I rarely use this feature, but I always use sleep cycle and/or the alarm function on my iPhone. If I could feed info from Sleep cycle into Path, I would.
• Location – I find myself using Path more and more, when checking in. Path let’s me share check ins on Foursquare, which is great, but I find myself missing the social and gaming features when I go too long without checking in on Foursquare. Integration both ways would be cool
• Images – I post images to Flickr. Have done for years and years. And I also post to instagram. One more photo sharing service just isn’t going to work for me. But to be able to feed content in from the other two would be awesome.
• Music – obviously, I would love for Path to just display whatever I was listening to on Spotify or even what I scrobble to LastFM.
• Status – draw from Twitter and/or Facebook.

I know, that apple will probably not let the good peeps at Path grab info accross that many apps, but to the extent that the could (some are services, too, which should make it easier) I’d be over the moon.

Basically, I suppose, Path would be like Evertale for iPhone. Or I could just hold my breath and hope for an iPhone friendly vesrion of Evertale.

I won’t go into detailed reviews of the two platforms (a gazzillion people will write those), but let me just quickly recap what drew me to them.

I have been anticipating Diaspora for a while. I love the idea of a social network that is open source, and that basically aims at doing all the things right that Facebook does wrong. And i love the opportunity to get the whole list making, selective sharing thing right from the get go. Yeah, it’s alpha and the search function is crummy and it is buggy on my iPad, but the idea, man…

The basic idea of Path is to limit the amount of people you share your ‘path’ with to fifty, ensuring that you keep the platform exclusive to your closest friends, and thus you are likely to share more openly. Add to that that Path is intended to live primarily on your mobile device, and you’ve got a winner, right?

So what am I wining about?

Well basically, I have one aspect (that’s what they call lists) in Diaspora that is full of good people, and it’s called ‘peeps from twitter’. Oh yeah, there’s one guy in my ‘work’ aspect, but he’s in the other aspect too. I suspect it will be a long time before that changes.

And Path? Well messages are rolling in that people are sharing their paths with me, and I readily share back. Who are those people, then? Well, basically, they are the exact same people that i already share stuff with on twitter, and that I have already added to my ‘peeps from twitter’ aspect in Diaspora. They are good people, and I love sharing stuff with them, but I DO THAT ALREADY!

So the way I see it, I have a couple of choices If I am ever going to get the most out of these cool new tools.

Either I stop using Facebook and Twitter, and reserve my sharing for more exclusive or open source platforms. Ideally, that might work, it would just require around 500 people i follow on Twitter to do the same. I’m just not ready to give up on the awesome conversations on Twitter, and there’s actually quite a lot of value for me on Facebook still.

Or I could start sharing more of myself in the more exclusive forums and more niche-like lists… Well, I already share every damn thing I can think of, except of course for stuff that I will never share. On any platform. That I might share one-on-one with close friends, but never put online.

Finally, I could start cross posting like a mad man, and that would probably only lead to people finding me annoying. In fact, I’d find me pretty annoying If I did that.

I’ll keep posting to both Diaspora and Path, cause they’re cool places each in their own right. But I look forward to the day when the meaning of adding two new social networks to the mix dawns on me. Has it dawned on you yet?

My kid turns one today and I cannot BEGIN to explain how much he means to me.

Happy b-day Alvin.

Your dad loves you very much.

Over the last couple of weeks he has turned to his network on Twitter and Facebook to vent and find release for some of his frustrations. And the network responded with sympathy and encouragement.

It has been no less than moving to follow, and it gave me a completely new perspective on how social media can (also) be used.

I take my hat off to you for being so honest and open, Mads. And I wish you all the best for the future. I’m sure you’ll emerge powerfully from this crisis.

But where to draw the line? And how?

At the moment I cross-post to:

• twitter
• jaiku
• Pownce
• facebook
• plaxo
• LinkedIn
• myspace

I’m considering removing facebook from the list and posting separately on that one, and I suppose I could target my posts to Plaxo and LinkedIn more acurately to their intended audience. On the other hand, I do enjoy posting ridiculously personal status updates to up-tight-ish LinkedIn.

Any thoughts on cross-posting out there? (other than “don’t”)