Posted by Average Joe on June 14, 2009 under Social Media | 
One of the biggest social Networks, would by no doubt be Facebook. Facebook enables people to connect in a way that many have come to expect as everyday. The site gives a large number of ways to interconnect with other users, and has grown at quiet astounding rates.
The first thing that you can do is create your own profile, and include as much or as little information as you like about your interests, your contact details, location, schools, workplaces, as well as other details. Additionally you can add photo’s to a gallery or more then one gallery. And you have the option to share your profile with everyone or just with the people that you accept as friends.
Connecting with friends is a more important part of Facebook, then some other social networks, as hearing about and sharing what is actually going on for you is an important part of this social network. Additionally with the type of interactions that are most commonly available they are not always things that you want to be sharing with a huge group of strangers, which is part of the reason why private private profile options available.
A lot of the idea is to be sharing with your friends, what you are doing, your stories, your photo’s and favorite links and information. However another much larger part of using Facebook is the applications and Groups. Groups let you connect with other people that are interested in a similar idea, hobby or such. Anyone can join groups and there are the normal things such as discussion groups and the likes which are part of the group.
The Applications however some seem to take on a life of their own. Some of the applications are simple one with survey’s or trivia Q & A, while others are more like a network in themselves, or fully fledged games that you can play. This is maybe not the best area of the site to be thinking about growing your web based business, but it can be a fun place to relax for a little while. However it is something that can quickly become addicting.
Finally is the ever growing ability to connect with other sites and share information using Facebook Connect. There are more and more sites coming around that are letting you use your Facebook credentials to connect and log into their service and share information with your Facebook friends, and vise versa.
Facebook is possibly a definite part of the strategy that you need to be looking at with Social Media, however it may not necessarily be the best suited to your specific aims for your site. So it is something that you can only really work out from trying it.
You can visit Facebook at www.facebook.com and you can join me as a friend on Facebook at www.facebook.com/no.office
Posted by Average Joe on under Social Media |
Plurk is a Social Network that allows you to connect with others, and update them on what you are doing with a time line that keep track. The Site, loads up with the time line across the top, and the other area where you can manage your updates and your friends in the bottom half of the screen.
You have a user name that your updates are sent from and then have the option to choose from about a dozen or so different options for the joining text to your update, things like “wants to” or “Is”. The concept is fairly similar to other sites that offer you the ability to update your status with your friends, however there is a couple of small differences.
The first is the use of a system called Karma, which gives you points for doing a certain range of things, while it takes away points of other things. This seems like a good system, as it means you can be rewarded for being a good member of the community, however at the same time, some of the things add or remove possibly for what i would imagine is the wrong reason. The easiest way to gain Karma is to log in a lot, it gradually adds a little each time and builds up.
Possibly one of the downfalls of this system is that the time line could get quite cluttered if you have a large group of friends that update often. While there are filters to break this down, it could also become time consuming to do so.
Of course there is a place for plurk it does have some good benefits, however you would need to weigh up the advantages to what you actual goal of using the service is.
You can visit Plurk at www.plurk.com
Posted by Average Joe on under Social Media |
Twitter is one of the more recent Social Networks to become available for people to use. In saying this though, i need you to understand it is already a well developed site. With a large community of dedicated users.
What twitter is in essence is a social network that is kind of like a chat room only it is continually ongoing and is with everyone, for the most part. Anyone can join your conversation and as such you can join anyone elses. This makes it a very powerful network if used correctly.
As with any system like this it does have some limits, for example your message cannot exceed 140 characters in length. Also there are other limits such as you cannot connect to follow more then 2,000 people without first having that many people follow you. Additionally there are limits on the number you can follow in a day, the number of messages you can send and such. However unless you are permanently there using it exactly like a chat room you should have little issues with these limits.
Finally Twitter has been set-up with an API that developers can make use of to connect their program to Twitter directly. This means that there are a wide range of tools available to improve the way that you use Twitter. Some make it easier and some just give you a different way to use it.
Either way Twitter appears to me to be something that is going to be only growing at the moment, and it is something that if you plan to make use of Social Media, that you cannot ignore.
You can visit Twitter at www.twitter.com or follow me @no_fixed_office