Social Gator is an aggregator of your social network feeds. The widget will display, in chronological order, your status updates from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr with support for more feeds on the way.

Search for Social Gator on WordPress or in the Plugins section of the Administration panel of your website. Or follow <a href=”http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-gator/” target=”_blank”>this link</a>.

But this concept – sharing your most recent status – isn’t new. In fact, there’s a deep evolution of this concept that goes way back to the Egyptians.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled and painted onto walls were one of the earliest examples of documenting the status update but in a macro way. The scribes of the time intended to document history and built a monuments to serve as a way of telling future generations what they were doing at that time. Whether it was building pyramids in Giza, the opening of the Sphinx, etc., they used walls and chisels to give us their status update. This trend continued with the Greeks and the Romans, but instead of walls, paper begun to surface. Manuscripts were authored and history was documented. The Gutenberg Press certainly revolutionized this idea and begun to mass produce the status update.

But these status updates were still being distributed in a macro perspective – whether it was Thomas Payne’s Common Sense or the publication of national newspapers breaking news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Internet, however, would turn this concept upside down – and make it personal.

For the first time, mass communication became firmly entrenched in the hands of the individual. In the early 1990s, Usenet and message boards became  popular. Thus it became a primary means of telling people where you were and what you were doing. 1994 brought about online diaries and those who shared their lives in this medium were called online diarists, journalists, and journalers. The term, web log, was first coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The shorter and now maninstream version of web log first appeared in 1999 as a joke by Peter Merholz, who separated the phrase into we blog on the sidebar of his blog, peterme.com. Thus the blog was born.

But the status update (a microblog) became a separate concept altogether. People begun to share the very basic, and perhaps most vapid points of their lives. Away messages on chat programs like AIM became a great medium to share the all important where you are and what you’re doing tidbit of information. 2004 brought about Facebook and the status update soon followed. Twitter jumped on board as a service completely devoted to the concept of a microblog.

Now, with iPhones, Blackberries, and other smart phones, you have apps like Loopt and Foursquare that will remove the need to have to tell people where you are as your phone already knows and can pinpoint close points of interest around you. What would the ancient Egyptians done with something like that? They probably wouldn’t have had the time or desire to build the lasting monuments to human achievement that they did…

But the Web as an application platform has plenty of flaws. Chief among them are the bevy of clients available for the reading of web applications each of whom follow their own set of rules. By far, the most frustrating thing about developing simple websites to advanced applications is making sure each entity is cross-browser compliant. Although the browsers are becoming more standardized with each new release, there is still a very relevant dinosaur that rears its ugly head every time. That dinosaur is Internet Explorer 6. Conceived as a part of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Internet Explorer 6 achieved a usage of nearly 90% in 2002 and 2003. The Internet Explorer series has slowly been on a decline since the release of Mozilla’s widely popular Firefox browser and Apple’s Safari browser. However, many legacy web applications are only supported on the Internet Explorer 6 platform thus many corporate networks restrict the installation of other browsers or even more updated versions of Internet Explorer which are much more standards compliant than the IE6 dinosaur.

Non-standardization across browser platforms is perhaps the greatest challenge when building sites and applications. Unlike the packaging process used for desktop applications which uses operating system componenents to render display, Internet applications require developers to code specifically for not just different browsers but different versions of browsers as Internet Explorer 6 behaves much differently from 7 or 8.

Typeface restrictions are second on my list of pet peeves in developing for the Web. Web developers tend to stick with standard fonts (of which there are around 7 or 8 ) because browsers require the end-user to have the specific font installed on their computer for it to render correctly. It is possible to embed fonts inside of websites to have the user’s browser download a specific font and then rendering it correctly, but this method solves few problems as most fonts are commercially licensed. Without the permission to distribute a selected font, which most if not all companies will grant, then you cannot legally use this method.

A few patch methods exist, but the implementation is difficult and often requires the user to have flash installed and javascript enabled, which a majority do, but nonetheless will prohibit some mobile browsers from rendering correctly.

Although the Internet as a platform has a few flaws that must be dealt with on a case-to-case basis, the ease of installation and upgrading on the client end more than makes up for it. The Internet’s shortcomings are more than made up for since the Internet can essentially deliver enterprise-level applications without a single install (ok, maybe you’ll need a few ActiveX controls, Flash, or some other add-on) and without forcing the user to manually upgrade their product with a new release. Further, the good news is that with each new browser release or upgrade, standardization becomes more and more mainstream. The typeface issue will likely be resolved by the end of the year as a commercial solution is on the horizon of release. I’ll of course keep you updated.

For the corporate world, blogs can have an underlying importance that many small business owners don’t know. Sure they’re useful for educating your client base or providing a format for information distribution, but well written, regularly updated blogs receive another benefit that could mean money: search engine rankings.

Most of the major search engines update their listings according to an incredibly complex formula that takes content into consideration and usually in a large way. For corporations, writing regular blog posts about industry topics and doing so with a mindset of which search terms are important to their search listings will yield results.

For a local real estate agent, writing regularly about their area’s real estate news and developments will get them listed higher for the terms relating to their industry. If done correctly and done with patience, they could be on page 1 of Google with the term ‘real estate agent.’ That could very well result in clients that the agent would not have otherwise gotten. After all, you are likely not to be able to find a more qualified website lead than someone who is searching your skill or product online.

Writing a blog does not necessarily mean you will get the search bump you desire. A mindful strategy of writing the right topics for the right people and syndicating in the right places will yield results.