Contents
Social networks review
Social networks are really something, they make life easier at times, but mostly you just dive right in and can’t imagine your life without del.icio.us, facebook or myspace. Review is about the Social networks/utilities I use, reviews of them, and how can you benefit from them or just make your life easier.
Dividing them in categories, as usual.
- News Hunting.
- Bookmarking.
- Group blogs.
- Friends/Dating etc.
- Photo/Video sharing.
News Hunting Social Networks
The concept of these resources: You find something interesting in the web, submit it there and If people like It (there are many more factors, like friends, karma etc, later on that) your submission becomes popular. So, the content is submitted by the people and filtered by the people.
Digg is really something. You can “digg” articles you like and you have to “digg” through thousands of submissions to find something interesting for you. Power Users control most of the content on the site, so even if you submit revolutionary news, but don’t have any friends who you can shout to… well, it might be lost in the digg’s flow of submissions.
Reddit is what I like best from all of the newshunter sites. It’s minimalistic and highly customizable. You can filter the frontpage from the content you don’t want, or you can create your own “reddit”, your own category of submissions.
Bookmarking.
Social bookmarks can be really helpful. Well, you can access your bookmark database from anywhere you want, when something happens to your system, your bookmarks that you’ve gathered for ages won’t be lost. I Use del.icio.us and Stumbleupon.
Del.icio.us – simply good for bookmarking. You can install a plugin for your browser and everytime you bookmark something, it’s automatically bookmarked at del.icio.us. You can arrange your bookmarks with tags, share them etc. very helpful.
Internet Explorer Del.icio.us Plugin
Firefox 3 del.icio.us Plugin
StumbleUpon. One of my favorites. Apart from bookmarking it brings you some really juicy features. Install Stumble toolbar (It’s really worth it), check the things you are interested in and start stumbling upon interesting stuff. So it works like this: when you like some site, just push the “thumbs up” button on the toolbar. That’s it, it’s added to your favorites. And when you just want to surf and find something interesting hit the “Stumble” button. You can also filter the content you want to stumble by its type (video, images, etc.) I just love it.
Group blogs/Micro blogs.
The group blog concept of these is similar to plain blogs. Articles, news, reviews etc. Except that a lot of people participate in the content creation, friend and rating systems are implemented etc. They are like ordinary blogs very niche specific. I read Mashable – social networking news. And Sphinn – Internet marketing, SEO, etc. Some really good conent can be found on these sites.
The only Micro blog, as people like to call it, that I use is Twitter. You simply write what you are doing now and ‘followers’ ( the people who want to read your ‘twitts’) read your updates. Who the hell would need that informaton? you might ask. Well, your mother would like to know what you are doing, when you’re far away @ college, or your co-workers would find your ‘project progress’ (or whatever) twitts priceless. Too much has been said about twitter already, just check it out.
Friends/Dating
MySpace. A huge social network. You can basically do anything, you have your own MySpace profile page with your blog, bulletins, friends, groups, photos, videos etc. The good thing about MySpace is that you can customize your profile the way you want to, i mean the appearance. MySpaceTV is pretty good. Try it.
Facebook. The Idea is similar to MySpace, but facebook offers much more “extendability” features. And no unique profile look. ;( But it’s, IMO, better than myspace in the terms of communicating with your friends, finding people you know etc.
(Why the hell am I writing about MySpace and Facebook? Everyone has an account at one of these :D)
