Facebook
Facebook is the king of social networks, rivaling only with Twitter due to Twitter’s ability to easily mass-promote and connect with others.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed is a simplistic social network that lets you bring feeds from a variety of sources, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and your RSS feed, into one central location. Additionally, FriendFeed can post updates to other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social network site designed more as a resume-style site, but there’s definitely the basic social networking aspect involved. You can use LinkedIn both as a way to network with professionals, and to participate in typical social networking.
MySpace
An oldie but a goody, MySpace is one of the original social networks, and while it’s now very music and independent artist oriented, it’s still worth participating in.
Ping.fm
Ping.fm is not so much a social network as it is a type of forwarding service that will take updates you send to it and forward them to a variety of social networks and even IM clients and sites, such as Yahoo. I personally use Ping.fm, and I love it.
Twitter
Twitter is worth using, period. Need I say more?
What I love about Twitter is just how much potential it has! Connecting with my own 1400+ followers with any given tweet, plus having the capability to reach millions of other users who may stumble across my messages is just an amazing feeling. Thanks to Twitter, I have accomplished the following:
- received customer service
- helped out with CSS and HTML issues
- borrowed a few bucks
- lent a few bucks
- won an iPod Touch (!!!)
- got book recommendations
- got birthday and Christmas gift recommendations
What has Twitter done for you?
Apparently, I’m not the only one who gets in trouble for my tweets. Sarah Palin, of Alaska fame, has been noted for her fondness for sending her message over Twitter. Newsweek compiled some of her greatest hits. The one I find the most intriguing is the one concerning the Gulf oil spill. According to Palin, it’s better to drill in Alaskan wilderness.
Twitter is a self-described micro-blogging service that definitely falls under the category of social networks, even if it approaches the whole social networking aspect a little differently than other types of social networks. While Facebook and MySpace are all about building massive profiles and connecting with others based on various interests, education, work, groups, etc., Twitter is all about microblogging — specifically, telling the world what you’re doing at any given moment. Just as you’d use Facebook to connect with high school friends, you’d use Twitter to tell people that you’re currently shopping for women’s sunglasses.
Twitter allows users to include one URL in their profiles; this URL is viewable whenever anyone views your profile (located at twitter.com/your_username_here). But you can also customize the background image and colors of your profile, meaning you could create a custom background image that lists any other blog, business or portfolio URLs that you’d like to get out there.
It’s easy to find people to follow on Twitter. And by using hashtags (#hashtag), you can easily get your updates listed under certain hashtag search results. Let’s say you’re discussing Obama. “Tag” it by adding #obama at the end of your update (called a tweet), and that update will be included in any search someone does for the hashtag #obama!
Twitter easily puts your message out there for millions of people to view. Individuals and companies all over the world are quickly seeing and harnessing the power of Twitter, and you should too!
