Social Media Sudoku

31Aug08

The past few days, I’ve attempted life as a ‘normal person‘. Going out with friends, dates, bars, and today, I even had an ‘average Sunday’ — Sunday brunch, Sunday errands, lazy Sunday in a park, then Sunday coffee with my friends, complete with the Sunday paper.

As I was playing Sudoku, my mind started wandering, and the numbers morphed into icons of various Social Media networking sites I participate in. Then I realized, I may have a problem. I am addicted to the Internet, especially Social Networking Sites. (image via: troller.com, a site randomly found Googling for a visual to add to this post.)

I am signed up for over 20 different services, and the list of new accounts keep growing. Since I’m signed up for an abundance of services, it may seem as though ‘clone’ sites are spawning, but I disagree. It’s quite exciting to see how these ‘clone’ sites integrates and appropriates various features and functions of their predecessors to fit their own formulas. Just like how cars, gadgets, and electronics keep getting ‘better’, I firmly believe Social Networking sites do, as well.

To omit redundancy, I separate everything via purpose of the respective services so I’m not overloaded, overwhelmed, or bored by all these sites. I’ve learned to quickly distinguish which sites I will participate in, or not. sidenote: Dear Louis Gray: I took a screen shot of part of your blog post: “There is No Social Media Overload” and inserted it in my post. Hope you don’t mind ;). Basically, as LG (Louis Gray) says:

So I decided to share what services I participate in and why I do.
RSS feed reader = Google Reader

• Familiarity. I’m used to the interface, since it resembles Gmail. :)
• I share and exchange information with my GTalk contacts.
• It’s easy to organize and maintain.

Microblogging identities = Twitter

• My outlet of brain dumps in 140 characters or less. Most of my Tweets sound like fortunes from fortune cookies…
• Habit. It’s easy to update via phone, 3rd party clients, and Twitter is my first micro-blogging service.
• It hones my grammar and organizational skills. Staying under 140 characters or less is not as easy as it seems!

Business Networking Tool = Facebook

• I use Facebook for my ‘adult’ relationships. From business, to childhood friends, old teachers… Anyone I stay in contact with, via annual or bi-annual ‘Hello’ message, Facebook is the place to do it. Everyone and their grandmothers (literally) are on Facebook. Since their site re-design, we have a love-hate relationship. I cannot stand the new site and features. HA

Social Network = Myspace

• I have one just to have… one? It tookva long to perfect the wording of my profile on that darn thing, so I just can’t get myself to delete it. That’s all. lol.

Service aggregator or lifestream = FriendFeed

• The community.
• Ease of posting.
• Exchange of information. Everything from pictures of the day, useless gadgets, politics. tech news, real news… I barely check my Google Reader, since I get the latest news on FriendFeed :)

There’s one more service I actively participate in, and that’s Rejaw. They’re the ‘newest shiniest clone site’, at first glance, that may seem like ‘another micro-blogging service’, but it’s not. The easiest way to describe it, is: Modernized IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I’ve never participated in any IRC room? Service? Community?, but basically, it’s chatting with other members of the site, since the ‘micro-blogging posts’, are updated real time. And because of the chat like interactions, Rejaw — to me, is a site I can get to know my friends from various Social Sites on a more personal level. So why not just IM? Simple. It doesn’t give me that ‘community’ like feel, where anyone and everyone can participate in conversations. On top of that:

• Media is easily embeddable. With only the media link, a video, image, or mp3, is inserted in the thread.
• Private / public multi-participants are possible.
• And the dev team is amazing. They participate, interact with users, open to feedback, and extremely helpful.

Currently, they’re still adding / rolling out features, so I will definitely do a more detailed introduction to the site, since I love it so much :). Add me on Rejaw by clicking this :)

Anyway, those are the sites I’m active in.
What are yours? And which ones are your favorites? How many do you participate in? Are you overloaded?

Filed under: FriendFeed, Social Networking, Twitter, misc sites   |  14 Comments
Tags: facebook, FriendFeed, Google Reader, Myspace, Rejaw, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0