Why so many?

Often, lately, when I am using some of my favorite online tools, i can't help but wonder why so many. I use twitter, reader, posterous, this blog, FB to acquire and disseminate information. These might seem a like a few but there is quite a bit of an overlap and differences in what these can do.

For example, twitter and FB both ask me to update my status (what I'm thinking/doing with an emphasis on right now). But what I choose to post on these two is quite different. No, it's not MPD but its because whatever I say I am doing on twitter is a rather short experience. Fleeting, if you may. An article I am reading through, a thought, a question or an idea. The audience also is a mix of my own friends, acquaintances, people I've never met and random bots. Which means that there is a certain level of privacy that needs to be maintained. On FB on the other hand, my status remains constant for days, sometimes weeks even. I am reluctant to changing it every hour or two simply for the reason that I wouldn't be interested in knowing my friends' status/state of mind every two hours. The audience here is strictly people I know and trust but wouldn't like to bore with mundane details.

Posterous is a really convenient way to post things you find interesting over the net. From articles to videos to pictures to anything found on a webpage. Much similar to services like delicious, digg or tumblr. But how is this different from Reader? Well, while GReader lets me broadcast these interesting things only to my friends, posterous allows me to create a space with all of this info that I find cool, open to everyone. While it might seem like the difference is the audience, a question to ask myself is wouldn't my friends be the first ones to know about my posterous blog. Posterous is also an easy way to keep organize all the interesting stuf I find online in my own space. But then, so is google reader. While posterous raises the the e-junk, eating up the webspace issue, reader doesn't (afaik)

Again, this blog is very similar to posterous and twitter because I end up tweeting about something interesting that I might also choose to post on posterous. The difference however is twitter is a microblogging tool which only needs like 1/10th of my opinion on something.. posterous is an easy way to put things onto a blog when I stumble on something extremely cool at work but I have no time to write down my thoughts on it... and this blog is where I wrote my long winding thoughts without periods and only ellipses...you get the drift.

So, essentially its the same goal, acquiring and distributing information, how we do it may involve more than one tool. However, its important to have a hold on yourself when you find absolutely cool new tool and ask the yourself if you're doing the same thing in a different format.

Other questions to ask ourselves, do I need friendfeed if I have twitter, do I need FB if I have orkut or vice-versa of the above.