I often enthuse about the paradox of voting — the phenomenon whereby economists struggle to explain why people vote. But when I talk about it to anyone else, the idea is normally met with a combination of confusion and mirth.

I escaped early though. Realising early on that I didn’t really have a talent for economics, I switched tracks soon after completing my degree. I still retain an interest in the subject though, and it definitely still affects the way I think.

The core problem that economics is concerned with is the allocation of scarce resources. Poor John Stuart Mill was traumatised by the problem. When trying to take his mind off the dismal issue, he turned to music. But he only found himself worrying about the scarcity of different musical notes. This insight in turn led him to conclude that, one day in the future, every possible combination of notes will be exhausted and there will be no new melodies.

He needn’t have worried. As we all know in these vuvuzela-aware times, millions will happily make do with one solitary hooting B♭.

A thought about scarcity suddenly struck me today. It is widely thought that this generation will be vilified, but most assume that it will be because we’ve used up all the oil or something.

But what about those all-important usernames on that we depend upon as our identities on the internet? Everyone who has tried to sign up for a half-decent email address knows that it can be a complete pain finding a unique username that isn’t idiotic.

That is how I ended up with an idiotic moniker like ‘doctorvee’. Even this mad username was already taken up on YouTube and Skype when I tried to sign up to those sites. Moreover, some other chappie has decided to call himself ‘Mr DeeJay Doctor V€€’, thereby putting paid to my chance of buying doctorvee.com, should I ever have felt the urge to do so.

The problem is bad enough today. Maybe we can keep on signing up to Twitter with vaguely comprehensible usernames for a few years more. But what about 10, 50, 100 years in the future? Surely by then everything will be used up.

Or perhaps, like Mill and his music, it is just the paranoia that comes with the territory when you think like an economist.

Digsby is quite cool because not only does it unite your IM accounts but it throws in your email and social networking accounts as well. So updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace sit alongside your buddy list. Neat stuff. I believe support for more social networks is in the pipeline too.

Having said that, the Twitter features leave a lot to be desired. I have since started using Twhirl which I think is fantastic, save for the fact that it doesn’t open automatically when my computer starts up.

Beforehand I updated Twitter using Google Talk. But once I installed Twhirl I switched IM Twitter updates off because of course I was getting duplicate messages. But even then the problem of duplicate (or triplicate) messages did not go away. It got me thinking about the increasing trend for stuff people publish on one website to be automatically re-published elsewhere.

A lot of people I know use a Facebook application called TwitterSync. I am among them because I was screaming out for Facebook to allow this for a long time. The app automatically updates your Facebook status with your latest Twitter tweet.

This is cool because enlightened people know how great Twitter is, but there are so many more people on Facebook who do not use Twitter but could still benefit from the wise words you post on Twitter. The Facebook status is the ideal way to give your Twitter account a wider audience.

But what about those people who are friends with me on both Facebook and Twitter? They get the status updates twice. This was not so annoying beforehand. But because Digsby is hooked up to Facebook and Twitter, I get two little pop-ups telling me all about it — and this is in addition to Twhirl’s alerts.

This reminded me of a post written by Robin Hamman a couple of weeks ago. He asked, “is auto-feeding links to Twitter spammy?”

Then I came across a website called Tweet Clouds. This site produces a word cloud or heatmap of the words you use on Twitter. Three words tower above all the others: New. Blog. Post. Those three words appear at the start of each automatically generated tweet advising followers that I have just published something on my blog.

I do quite like it when people alert their followers on Twitter to the fact that they have just published a blog post. I think other people like it as well. I have just checked and over the past year Twitter has been this blog’s fifth highest referrer, bringing 888 visits. That is above Google Search and Google Search UK (although below Google Image Search and Google Image Search UK).

If you take out search engines and blog aggregators, Twitter is the second-biggest referrer to this blog (the biggest being Times Online’s blog platform, which is concentrated on just a few posts). Remember that this does not even include those who are visiting from the Twitter stream in their IM client or another application.

I often also click through when a new blog post is mentioned on Twitter if it sounds interesting enough. But I cannot stand it when other feeds are injected into a Twitter stream — people’s tumblelogs, Delicious links and the like. That is just overload.

If I was interested in someone’s Delicious links, guess what — I’d be subscribed to their Delicious feed. If I cared in the slightest about somebody’s tumblelog, I’d visit their tumblelog. Equally, however, you could say that if somebody really cared about my blog posts then there is already an adequate way to be alerted to new posts: RSS.

This problem is going to increase in the coming year as lifestreams and social aggregators such as Profilactic, FriendFeed and Socialthing! gain in popularity. In fact, these sites themselves demonstrate the problem itself rather nicely.

If you look at, for instance, my Profilactic ‘mashup’, you will see my blog posts appearing and soon afterwards the Twitter tweet announcing it. Then you will see my Delicious links repeated in a blog post (for vee8 at least). Jaiku had to be taken out because it is itself a pseudo-lifestream that already incorporates Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and what-have-you.

Plus, Facebook has just begun to implement its own social aggregator-style features. If you already have the Delicious application installed then import your Delicious posts into your Facebook news feed, you will be getting the duplication in the Facebook news feed alone. (I tried it hoping that it would sync with Facebook’s ‘Posted Items’ feature — no such luck.)

This whole problem is summed up quite succinctly by Jon Bounds in a comment at Cybersoc:

The Facebook status, pulled from a twitter auto-announcing a blog post generated from del.icio.us links is not what I want form these services. And I get the feed of it at each stage.

It is probably time to step back, decide on which social aggregator I want to use, stick with it and stop republishing stuff on other websites. Still, I can’t help thinking that it just feels right to merge my Twitter account with my Facebook status, and it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.

At the same time, it’s just not cool to read the same messages over and over again on several different websites. The internet is starting to feel like a giant echo chamber.

So I had a wee conversation with my brother just to see what the chat history was like. It’s pretty basic, almost exactly the same as the chat window in Google Talk. But that’s all you need. And because for some reason MSN Messenger’s chat history won’t work for me at the moment (serves me right for using beta versions of both MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer I guess), it’s +1 for Google Talk.

And as my test conversation went on I ended up being very impressed with Google Talk. To be fair, I had only ever used it a couple of times, and that was on the day that Google Talk launched. Which is a bit ago now.

Anyway, the upshot of it is that Google Talk simply does the job. It’s a swish, clean and basic interface, that gets across all the information you need in a novel way. I was surprised that they still haven’t got emoticons there yet — I suggested that Google just wanted to be retro about it, and my brother said that he liked Google Talk’s approach to emoticons anyway!

The appeal of Google Talk, I’ve decided, is that it sheds all of the bloat that comes with all the other major IM clients. MSN Messenger is just about the only IM client I use, simply because it’s what all my friends use. But it is filled with stupid features like nudges and winks and goodness knows what else. I really could do without all that. Google Talk goes right back to basics, and gives you what you need: instant messaging, with VOIP on the side.

My brother expressed his disappointment that Google Talk had not become a kind of Jabber-style application that would let you communicate with users of MSN, Yahoo! and AIM. Google Talk hasn’t revolutionised IM in the same way that Gmail revolutionised email — but it’s not Google’s fault that there isn’t a standard, er, standard for IM. This reminds me, though — what happened to MSN and Yahoo! merging their IM systems. I haven’t heard anything about that in ages. I take it this is still happening?

And VOIP! I had never tried this before. It suddenly occurred to me that I could use the microphone that came with my iRiver. My brother informed me that pink sockets mean microphone sockets. Yes.

This in turn spurred me on to finally download Skype. I’ll be honest with you hear: it’s pretty shit when you haven’t got any contacts. And can you believe that ‘doctorvee’ was taken! What a bastard! I have had to invent a variation: doc-vee. Ew.

So the desire to test a pretty basic chat history feature in Gmail when I was bored led to a mini revolution in the way I use IM. Until tomorrow when I revert back to MSN because all my friends are on it. Because that’s the other problem with IM. No matter how good an IM client is, it is difficult to switch over simply because you have to use the one that all your friends are using, otherwise you’ll have nobody to talk to. Which means using MSN. Gah!