Over the past couple of days, I’ve been kicking around a few new sites that have recently popped up, and I thought I’d share some quick reactions:

One site is XeeMe. It provides yet another place to list all of the social networks you are part of, sort of like ReTaggr and DandyId. I’ve always liked DandyId best because of its API, although I never really ended up doing a lot with either of them. XeeMe also has some sort of contact management that might prove interesting, but it is taking a while to load my data and I’m not finding many of the people I know on XeeMe, so I haven’t found a real use for it yet. It also has a microcredit system and a raft of apps. I’ll kick it around a bit more later, probably.

Next up, Social Fortress. Basically, what this does is it encrypts your posts to social websites and emails. Encryption is done on the local machine making it much more difficult for others to snoop. It is easy to set up and use, running as a plugin to Chrome and Firefox, with an Internet Explore version coming. I tried it on RockMelt, which is Chrome based, and it seemed to work okay for Facebook, but not for Google+. I’ll probably do more testing on that later. In a lot of ways it feels like good old fashioned PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, with the advantage, or perhaps disadvantage, depending on how you look at it, that it handles keys nicely for you.

Once you’ve installed Social Fortress, you can let it know who you are willing to allow to see decrypt your messages. Essentially, it appears as if your key is tied to your email address, and that one key is installed per computer. This can present problems for people with multiple email addresses or people that share computers. Also, it doesn’t give a nice way of setting up groups.

This gets to the next issue I have with Social Fortress. Posting encrypted messages on a social media site is kind of annoying. If you are using Google+ and you only post it to a circle of people that you know are using the same encryption system, that’s probably okay. If Social Fortress starts gaining traction, hopefully these options will appear.

The final bit of technology I want to mention is an app called Hey Tell. It is a push to talk instant voice messaging system for smartphones. So far, for me, it seems to fill that area of when you want to send a quick message to someone, but you don’t want to send it as a text message, or some other short message, and you don’t want to place a phone call. However, so far, I don’t find that I’m really ever looking to do that, and I find this app not quite as compelling as various voice blogging systems, which I also almost never use. I might kick this one around a little bit later, but not likely.

So, what are you seeing for new technology?