Social Networking

I got an email from my dad the other day, asking me what I used Twitter for. I wasn’t sure why he was asking so I asked for clarification and got this response: “Just discussing Social Networking it would help to know why you use it and what you get from it”.

“Social Networking” is a broad term, and not one that I’d actually use to describe what I’m doing when I am “Social Networking”. Right now, I wouldn’t say I’m “Social Networking” – I’d say I’m blogging. Or I’m Tweeting, or I’m on Facebook. These are all things I see as distinct activities, even if they make up what can be called, in a broader sense, my “social network presence”. For each of the “Social Networking” services I use on a regular basis, I have different goals and different things I get out of it – below I’ve written a little bit about what these are.

This Blog

There’s the odd bit of personal information on here, and those posts that are more personal than others but my goal here is to write about what I’m working on as it progresses, to share what I’m thinking about. It’s linked to my Brazen Careerist and LinkedIn profiles and my Twitter account, as well as being linked on my Facebook.

Brazen Careerist and LinkedIn

These are my “professional” profiles. I don’t have many contacts yet on Brazen Careerist (it’s a new site) but LinkedIn I use to add people I’ve worked with and collect and give recommendations. Brazen Careerist is cool in that it makes the RSS feed from this blog part of my profile. There’s an interesting Q&A session with Penelope Trunk (from Brazen Careerist) and one of the things she says is,

A good way to think about Brazen Careerist is that LinkedIn focuses on experience and Brazen Careerist focuses on ideas. If you are young and short on experience, ideas is a better bet for you.

Despite have no contacts on Brazen Careerist yet (I should sell it more to my friends), the site drives more traffic to this blog as LinkedIn does.

Facebook

Facebook for me is purely personal. I use it to share photos and organize events with my friends. Because of how we use it for WISE I’m a bit more careful about my profile picture etc now but my privacy settings are fairly high and I’m picky about what friend requests I accept, deleting people who I no longer speak to etc. I wrote more about my mixed feelings about Facebook in this post.

Twitter

Twitter is my favorite social network at the moment. I really love it. I use it for communicating with my friends and the ambient awareness of knowing what they’re up to. I also use it to crowd-source my news. Following people whose opinion I respect I get a range of interesting information and links that keeps me informed and on top of what’s going on through very little effort on my part. I tend to tweet about what’s going on and interesting stuff that I find on the web.

Mycrocosm, 43 Places, Wakoopa and Last.fm

These are all website where I track stuff. Mycrocosm is really cool, it’s like micro-blogging through graphs. At the moment, I’m logging everything I drink. On 43 places I track the places I’ve been and the places I want to go to. Wakoopa and Last.fm both run on my computer – Wakoopa tracks the applications I’m using and Last.fm tracks the music I’m listening to.