The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Social Networking Adam Turner © |
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The social networking explosion makes keeping in touch easier than ever. Adam Turner explains how. |
Social networking revolves around telling world what you're thinking or doing right now, and keeping track of others. It's part of the "Web 2.0" model - with online communities creating content and interacting with each other, as opposed to merely consuming static content. Think of it as the difference between reading the newspaper and getting together with like-minded people to create your own magazine.
Electronic social networking pre-dated the World Wide Web in the form of text-based chat rooms and bulletin boards. Later came web-based instant messaging from the likes of ICQ and AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Skype. IM runs as a desktop application, smartphone application or through a web browser. It lets you maintain a "buddy list" and see if they're online and available to chat. You can send them text messages, which pop up on the receiver's desktop instantly, as well as chat via voice and video.
The growth of the World Wide Web also saw an explosion in static personal home pages. Next came blogging - open online diaries where you can write about your experiences while others come to read and leave comments.
These new forms of interaction combined in the rise of social networking sites such as SixDegrees, LiveJournal and Friendstar. They let you create an easily-updated home page - known as a profile. You can also monitor your friends's activities, leave comments on their home page and send messages to them. Today the most popular social networking sites are Facebook and MySpace, both of which have more than 100 million registered users.
When creating a Facebook account, you can scan your IM and email buddy lists for friends already using Facebook. Next you can create a profile and search for people. Behind the scenes, Facebook crosschecks for mutual friends and suggests other people who you might know. On your private Facebook home page, you can update your status, such as "is spending the day at the beach". You're also presented with a news feed of what your friends have been doing - listing their status changes, friends they've added and other activities they've undertake in Facebook. You can also see which friends are online right now. Everyone on Facebook has a public wall on which you can leave messages, including photos and video. Facebook also has photo galleries and an internal email and IM system.
Rather than constantly checking the website, you can install a Facebook desktop widget or browser toolbar to notify you of new events. One of Facebook's key attractions is that it's not limited to the desktop. You can can update your Facebook profile, and monitor your friends' profiles, via a variety of methods including email, SMS, RSS and smartphone applications. As such, for some people, Facebook has replaced blogging and email as the primary means of staying in contact with friends and colleagues.
Another of Facebook's key attractions is that it is a platform on which other
applications can run. For
example, you can play games against other users, create and share calendars and
keep track of books you've read. You can also use applications to interact with
other online Web 2.0 services, such as Flickr, Zoho, Google Calendar & Reader,
Digg, del.icio.us and Twitter. There's no need to install extra software, the
applications
all run in your browser on
the Facebook website.
Spartan micro-blogging services such as Twitter could be considered a response
to complex social networking ecosystems such as Facebook. Twitter is an SMS-like
blogging service in which messages
can only be 140 characters long - with no images, HTML or text formatting. You
can post messages using the Twitter website or via email, IM, browser plugin,
desktop
widget or SMS as well as third- party services as as Facebook. You've got the
same flexibility for receiving Twitter messages, as well as with RSS feeds.
Twitter is well-suited to
issuing status updates for friends, but it has found many other uses - such as
publishing new alerts or live reports from events such as conferences.
When you publish a message on Twitter, known as a Tweet,
it appears on your public
Twitter homepage for all to
see unless you opt to restrict them to approved users. You can search for other
users and opt to follow their posts,
with their Tweets appearing on your private Twitter homepage. You can send
messages to specific users by typing
You can send a private message directly to someone who follows your posts by typing dusername at the start.
Multiple users can tweet about the same topic by including #keyword in the post, for example #E08 for the US presidential election. You can search Twitter for specific keywords and then watch the results update in real time, subscribe to a custom RSS feed or use third party Twitter monitoring sites such as www.hashtags.org.
Note: Adam Turner © Permission to copy or quote
extracts from this article may only be done with the written permission of the
author.
Reprinted from the November 2008 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
