Social Networking Thoughts

I’m still alive…I promise to write more too!

Here is one side of an emerging conversation that I’m having with a friend. The subject, as becomes apparent, is the prevalence of Social Networking sites. The response that I crafted (below) was prompted by the question, “where are you? what services are out there that I should be on?”

Enjoy.

Will

ough question to answer. I am invited to (and try out) a lot of social network type sites. Rarely, though, do they reach enough audience to make it worth my while.

That being said, I do find my way around a few.

LinkedIn – professionals
Facebook – friends, sometimes colleagues
Twitter – the geeks, realistically
Seesmic – like twitter, but video

Some others find their way in and out. I still have a MySpace for example. Rarely do I find that I login to check it out. Too much spam and not enough quality content.

The thing that I really like about twitter are the replies. Facebook has seen this and has recently added their own sort of reply mechanism. It still isn’t the same. Seesmic is very similar to twitter with regard to structure and design. The problem is that the whole thing is really video-based and, therefore, somewhat difficult for most people to really accept.

Pownce lacks the draw that twitter has. Aside from file sharing, there aren’t any features that it has above twitter. I love Kevin Rose, but it really was a day late and a dollar short. Kevin proved it himself when he started promoting his twitter account publicly while basically ignoring his own service.

BrightKite interests me a bit. I haven’t had enough time to really dig deeper, though. Maybe it’ll happen. Don’t quite know yet.

Something that’s apparently important to me is that the service initiate and support some sort of conversation. Really, that is what socializing is about. What good is a social network that makes it difficult to converse or becomes basically a one-way mechanism for self promotion (one of the bases for my dislike of MySpace). Of course, there are some people who use Twitter and others for self promotion (twitter.com/tferriss) but they really miss the point. (I say this knowing and quite enjoying Tim’s ideas…still, it’s the truth).

Those are just some thoughts though. Everything changes and morphs over time so my position is bound to do the same.