Yesterday, I was in meetings and mostly offline for much of the day, so my unread emails have sky rocketed again. On top of that, I was told about two new social networking tools yesterday I want to explore.

The first is SpokeO. I kicked it around for a while, but so far, I’ve been pretty unimpressed with it.

The second is onaswarm. This site is overwhelmingly cool. I played with it for a while last night. It is supposed to support OpenID, but I tried to log in with OpenID today, and it said they weren’t accepting any new users. I guess they got swamped last night. Perhaps I can find how to associate my OpenID with my existing account.

It did go out and import 18 social networks that I’m part of. Today, it is asking for validation of a couple of them. The validation is returning blank pages, but seems to have worked. Well, it is a beta, after all.

When I go out to explore my contacts, well, that is where it starts go get overwhelming. It pulls in friends list from various sites, as well as picks up microformat tags. With that, it picks up over sixty sites that are identified as ‘me’. It grabbed another hundred general sites. It grabbed about a hundred from Livejournal and about 350 from Twitter. Other sites will a small number of friends added about another hundred althogether. These sites included Blogger, buzznet, Jaiku, last.fm, Myspace, Pounce, StumbleUpon, Tribe, Typepad, Upcoming and Vox .

Some of these sites over lap, although onaswarm doesn’t seem to recognize these overlaps yet. In my case, there was also some interesting stratification of the social networks. One group of friends were people that I knew from LambdaMOO. Many of them ended up on Livejournal and Tribe. Then, there were my friends from the 2004 presidential cycle. Some of them also show up in places like Livejournal and Tribe. Others of them have remained more active or connected than some of my old MOO friends.

It was curious that onaswarm brought in only two of my friends from StumbleUpon. I checked and saw that I had closer to a dozen. I also saw that a lot of people added me as friends on StumbleUpon that I haven’t added as friends yet. So, I spent a little time updating that. Now, if only I can figure out how to get onaswarm to recheck my updated friends on StumbleUpon.

One thing that I liked was the way onaswarm sorted my friends, by network, and then by name. I know that people have been looking for nice ways to get a sorted list of people they are following on Twitter. Onaswarm seems to do that.

The friend adding was slow, tedious, and didn’t really seem to bring much benefit. The sorting of entries in the feed didn’t seem to work all that well, and I’ve already got enough different sites that do this. What is interesting is that onaswarm, as well as many of the other friend feed type sites make their feeds available via RSS, so you can subscribe to them on other systems.

As I wrote in A maze of twisty little passages, all alike and Tracking the Twisty Mazes, there are all kinds of interesting and potentially horribly confusing things you can do in trying to link all of this together. Onaswarm just takes it to one more level.

So, I’ll poke around onaswarm a bit more when I don’t have hundreds of unread emails waiting for me, as well as a fun conference coming up.

Over on Twitter, a few people have been asking who is going to #PodcampNYC. If only I could get Onaswarm to check out who is going to be at Podcamp and come of with a list of people to say hello to.

Aleady, I know quite a few friends and fellow twitterers that will be there: Faye Anderson, Joyce Bettencourt (@rhiannonsl), Christine Cavalier (@PurpleCar), Tom Guarriello (@tomguarriello), Chris Hambly (@audio), Noel Hidalgo (@noneck), Dean Landsman (@deanland), Joshua Levy ( @levjoy), Drew Olanoff, Heath Row (@h3athrow), Liza Sabater (@blogdiva).

So, hopefully, I will rally and find the energy for all this social networking, not to mention, catching up