Social Networking…
So, I’ve been using a few Social Networking sites for a while now and I thought it was about time that I blogged a little about my own perspective on them. To start, let me list the websites I have been using:
- Plaxo
- Hi5
- FriendsReunited
I have to say first off that Hi5 is really not a site I’ve come to terms with or that I like. Score out of 10 is a 1 and I think very soon I’ll be waving a big goodbye to it.
Secondly, FriendsReunited is an English site and I use it solely to track some of the people I went to school with and for when I worked in the UK. I’ve not exploited all the things it can do and so it’s not fair for me to include it in this post. Needless to say, I’m not getting rid of it any time soon.
Plaxo and LinkedIn I have written a little about before and to me it appears that while LinkedIn has been around for a while and has a larger user base, Plaxo is gaining in popularity and has a slightly more casual feel to it than LinkedIn. From a professional viewpoint LinkedIn is definitely the website of choice, although it is a little staid in its approach and flexibility. But maybe that’s why more business people choose to use it; they are a little more staid themselves 
From my point of view Plaxo bridges a gap somewhere between LinkedIn and Facebook in terms of seriousness, flexibility and features.
Then there’s Facebook, an odd application that has taken me a while to get used to and embrace. I think that’s because I’m a serious business person (my category description – not me personally) who is in a different age group than most of the users of Facebook! Well, I don’t think that’s entirely the whole truth but when I frequently search for contacts that use Facebook, I rarely find new users. To put all this in some kind of perspective I currently have roughly the following contacts on each application (and this is only me and by no means representative of other people’s experience):
- Address Book – 550 (100%)
- LinkedIn – 184 (33%)
- Plaxo – 53 (10%)
- Facebook – 39 (7%)
- Twitter - ?
Again to further put this into perspective, I’ve only been using Facebook for about a month and about 90% of my Plaxo connections have joined in the last 8 weeks or so. So, maybe in another 3 months the distribution may be a little different (I’ll put a note in my ToDo to check that again). Lastly, I have a ‘?’ for Twitter as I have no real way of knowing exactly who uses Twitter and for what. Such is the nature of the application. Even so, that does not concern me as I use Twitter for my own purposes anyway.
So, what do I like and dislike? This is the part of the post that’s a little subjective and definitely my opinion and not someone else’s.
NOT Social Networking
- I like seeing a different side of my work colleagues on Facebook.
- I like being able to check up on colleagues I haven’t heard from for a while by seeing where they are on LinkedIn
- I hate having to use Plaxo as some kind of go-between application for LinkedIn and Facebook
- I like that Plaxo automatically synchronizes to my Google and Yahoo! Address books (and if I paid for premium services I could actually get rid of all my duplicates).
- I hate that LinkedIn and Facebook don’t synchronize
- I like the lively applications that are available on Facebook
- I like the full profiling capabilities on LinkedIn
- I hate the limited features and add-ons for LinkedIn
- I like that Facebook can be used to meet new people (whereas LinkedIn and Plaxo really aren’t designed for that)
- I like that Facebook and Plaxo can aggregate news / blog feeds and display them in your status updates for all to see
Some other personal observations are that I still exist in a world where a lot of my friends are not really into all this social networking stuff. I guess I’m from a pioneering age of PCs (the early 1980s) and most people my age and older use the Internet, use email for some things, have a few digital photos on their home PC, have a couple of CD compilations they’ve put together and avidly download movies to watch on a regular basis. And that’s about it. Just my opinion. If you knock 5-10 years off me the picture is very different. Another 5-10 years and it’s different again. The bottom line is that social networking means completely different things to different people. Sometimes it feels like I am using something that wasn’t designed for my age group – and I’m not even old! I guess a lot of people in their mid to late 40s (and older) have a routine that they’re in. They are very comfortable doing the things they do and don’t want to get out of their comfort zone. Sitting on the patio in the evenings; spending time in the garden; checking up on the upcoming grandchildren; phoning their friends; watching their evening TV series. It’s an easy thing to get into habits. Sure they wonder from time to time about how Joey from school maybe doing, or whether Sue from their last job finally got that promotion, but they never actually stop to do something about it. Habits are hard to break. Conversely the younger generation of people has grown up using these kinds of tools. They think nothing of Skypeing friends across the world; Twittering the fact they are in town for all to see; posting their latest crazy party photos to Flickr; and many more things besides.
So, that’s where my mind is at and I have no real conclusions. I generally like the experiences I have had with social networking sites, but there’s still some evolution that needs to take place in my opinion. There are still ‘holes’ in the complete experience and still things that don’t fit well. I really hate having to be on all these different sites for a slightly different experience. One day there will be something that aggregates them all together and grants me that mega-portal access I desire. By then I’ll be old and wrinkled and probably incapable of typing, but maybe by then speech input and true touch screen functionality will finally be an option. Who knows?
Anyway, I’m off to check on a few ‘peeps’ now and I’ll continue recording my experiences as the year progresses. Later…
