The different facets of the social landscape
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
Social media is currently big news in, well, social circles. There are now multitudes of sites on the net which are dedicated to the social aspects of the web. There are so many different sites - Facebook, MySpace, Digg, reddit, Twitter, del.cio.us, and many many more - it is hard to know what each site is for and really how useful each one is.
In the web age there is so much information, produced at a staggering rate, on the internet that keeping up is hard. Signal-to-noise ratios make it difficult to know which information is worth your time and which is, simply put, noise. Social media sites can help here, they can act as a kind of filter for the information out there by allowing you to essentially listen to others, be they friends, colleagues or industry experts, in order to promote content which hopefully should be relevant. Potentially a great solution, problem is that now there are so many social media channels that once again the signal-to-noise ratio is interfering again.
I use quite a few social media sites so thought I would show how I use each service for a particular function that keeps me up to date with industry chatter but also allows me to keep in touch with some of the noise from outside work.
RSS
First off is not a social media site as such but more of a service that the majority of sites now offer. RSS allows me to subscribe to regular content from a large number of services which I consider to provide high quality material. My RSS reader of choice - IE7 - looks after everything for me and notifies me that there is new content from a good source which I can read at my leisure. I have gone for a desktop-based solution rather than a web-based solution as I’m mostly desk bound but there are many different solutions out there.
Digg is a site I have been visiting for a number of years and it pioneered the social news movement. Stories are divided into a large number of topics and people vote on what they consider to be a newsworthy story. When enough people have voted a story becomes popular and is promoted to the front page. If you read the front page you can almost guarantee the stories are good quality and worth your time, comments are usually worth a laugh or two as well.
Digging stories yourself can act as a kind of bookmarking system however I don’t tend to use the service for this, I digg stories more as an expression that I found a particular story good. Digg also allows you to follow friends on the site, the idea being that if your friend found it interesting that you would probably find it interesting too. If you choose a select few like minded friends you are essentially promoting content to each other.
Like I said I don’t use digg for book marking, for this I use del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. I use this service not for content discovery but more as a store of sites which has specific information that I would find useful for my work. If I book mark something it will usually be for a page I would visit more than once.
Again with del.icio.us you have the opportunity to make friends and follow each others bookmarks. This for me is not an important feature so I just have a select few friends but I don’t follow their bookmarks too closely.
Twitter is a microblogging platform and it is only just recently that I have found a good use for it. Twitter allows you to make small statements on a very regular basis, it could very well be likened to the status update on Facebook. There is however a much better use of this service. I use it to follow the industry experts who often use the service to highlight newsworthy material. I don’t find it very useful to follow friends, but people who I have never met, and am unlikely to ever meet to call them friends. In turn I would like to use the service myself to highlight high quality material, with the occasional update on how I’m feeling 
Probably the most hyped site for the past year, this is the site where perhaps you can be the most social. Hundreds of friends (I wish!), a way to keep up with people you don’t see often enough because of hectic lifestyles! This is the service where I can switch off from the professional uses and use simply for fun. I have a MySpace page as well but I never got serious about it, Facebook is where it’s at! A true social network, in the social sense, but not much use to me in my professional life.
So as can be seen from above there are so many sites which I and some of my friends use on a regular basis. Some people may use alternative services for a similar function, how do you keep up with what everyone is using, and how do others keep up with you? Friendfeed provides a summary view of everything you publish on the net. It also allows you to follow others to see everything they are doing in a summary view. I once again use this for a select few friends, I don’t want the signal-to-noise ratio to be destroyed here as well!
So as can be seen there are a lot of facets to the social landscape, but they are important tools for me and could be for you too. I recommend getting involved in them - join the social revolution. I’ll leave a few links to my profiles below, feel free to follow me or become a friend!