Inspired the latest book I read, Linked, I few weeks ago [more like a month ago, after how long it took me to get this post written] I decided to take the plunge into the plethora of social sites/networks out there.
About 6 months ago I started actually using Facebook as my first real foray into participating in social networks (treading slowly). The purpose of Facebook for me was introduce myself into the social, reestablish communication with people of present and past. One of the most enticing properties of Facebook is that it was built based on what I would term, identity realism. An alluring (and comforting) tenet of the Internet is the ability to exist in one of three ways; anonymous, alternate persona or self. Facebook compels people to participate with their self identity giving the network a sense of realness.
But lets face it, there’s a lot of problems with trying to portray the real you. Extending your personal self with previous mechanisms on the Internet it typically boring (i.e. “My cat’s breath smells like cat food”) or filtered to fit the identity they want to portray.
Facebook was able to create a social network of realness by creating mechanisms to document what people are doing, not just what they are saying. This allowed Facebook to become a content producer without requiring people produce content (which all gets neatly packed up into one’s personal news feed). Become a friend with someone, that action is content. Write a message on someone’s wall or tell the world what you’re doing through a status update, that’s content. Heck even dumb things like throw a zombie or fight the ninja/pirate battle, that’s content And its real. The open application developer platform allowed people to develop more apps (some less purposeful than other) to further contribute to content creation. And a lot of these apps allow you to bring content from other Internet sources into your Facebook profile, which helps further add to the content to your real. Facebook apps somewhat solve the problem of aggregating all these disparate social network and applications into a holistic unified “me” that is your identity realism.
Flickr
Shortly after feeling a level of comfortableness with Facebook, I decided to join Flickr. As a hobby I started getting into Digital Photography a couple years ago. As a present to myself (I forget for what) I picked up a Nikon D50. The challenge I outlaid for myself was to attempt capture the beauty in everyday things (I was mainly into macro photography at that time). Since then I’ve taken many pictures (very few, if any, that are any good) and they sat on my hard drive on my computer pretty much never looked at. Flickr gave my photos a chance to be seen (assuming that’s a good thing). Why Flickr and not some other photo hosting site? Flickr is a community of professional and amateur photographers. Its a place were these people go to view and contribute pictures. I’ve personally spent a good many hours just looking at the different photos people have taken and posted. As a way to learn and challenge myself to become a better [amateur] photographer. Although I’ve been posting pictures to my own Flickr page, the real value is participating in groups. Not just becoming members, but sharing photos with them. Flickr groups are the networking hubs. Groups are the way you increase the visibility of your photos. Accompanying the higher visibility is the increased responsibility of sharing quality. I find I’ll upload some pictures that are “okay”, but I try to only share the ones i really like with a group. being that I want to share more, I’m pressured to learn more and try and shoot better photos.
Additionally, Flickr has open APIs which you can use to write your own applications to interact with photos posted. Although I haven’t done any development yet, I really really want to (probably with silverlight).
WordPress
There’s a lot of information on the Internet for one to consume. But consuming isn’t a value adding activity. going back to the Linked, its the hubs that are the key pieces of any network. The way to become a hub is to produce content. As part of my personal goal of being more extroverted and creating a personal brand, i decided i should start blogging as a way to share things i know. A way to participate in the conversation (ala ClueTrain manifesto). At first I tried Microsoft’s Live Spaces. It was…not good. The look and feel was not good. I gave WordPress a try and I love it. They have a lot of themes that look good and I can write posts to it using Windows Live Writer (which is just awesome in its own right)
So far, I’ve found the hardest part of blogging is the actual act of blogging. Its pretty time consuming. I think this is why a lot of the other social sites I’m using get more activity. Its a fine line between writing something so your participating and writing something to contribute value. At first I was annoyed at myself for “not blogging enough”. But I realized that if I’m not writing something that contributes something of value, its probably best that I’m not. There are a lot of things I’d like to share, but a blog isn’t necessarily the best way to share them (like re-posting links to other blog posts). The key to a blog isn’t just about writing things, but having it scoped to a particular topic (find a voice they say). Which is something I haven’t done well. You need to find a topic so you can build an audience. I need to work on that.
I think one of the features of Facebook that everyone really honed in on is the status update. Short action statements about what your doing. The fact that all status messages start with “Steve is” and they give you a little text box forced people into having tiny quick updates. That’s basically what twitter does. You follow friends, post your own updates, they follow you. quick and easy. I can update from my phone (via text message or mobile browser), a web page or any of the plethora of apps that have been written using their open API.
I really like twitter because I’m able to capture and share what i’m doing, how i’m feeling quickly. I can go back and look at my “tweets” and really get a sense for how my days/weeks/months have been. So its sort of a nice way of keeping a journal or log of what’s going on without any real reflection.
Likewise its a great way to keep up to date with others. Its nice because it speeds up conversations and interactions with others when talking over other mediums. Instead of asking someone how their day was, i can see that they tweeted about being something and ask them about it. For example, a tweet of “stressed because of all the work I have to do”, I can ask them if they need any help or want a break.
