Social Networking Websites
In the recent year a number of “social networks” has appeared online. NO, we are not talking about myspace or facebook (which although very popular – are a completely infected with spammers, malware and other not so cool “features”). Great for bands and shameless self promotion, but not for the busy professional. In fact, if your future employer “googles” your name and finds your myspace or facebook with some questionable content – guess who they’re NOT going to hire ?
So what are these social networks and what can they do for you?
Twitter.com
Let’s start with one of the more popular sites called “Twitter”. Twitter is a free social networking and “micro-blogging” service, where users can sign up for a free account, post updates (limited to 140 characters) and “follow” other users. Is it like “adding a friend?”. Not at all. Considering that you are limited to 140 character post, there is a lot of useful information and some very good links being posted by people on Twitter. This site has even found it’s way into the enterprise. Cisco, Comcast, Whole Foods, Dell, CNN, BBC and even Barack Obama can be found on Twitter and followed. Los Angeles fire department has used Twitter for communication in the 2007 wildfires.
There are many ways you can update your micro-blog, or “tweet”: IM, Txt Message (SMS), e-mail, or using a client (if you want to use this option just google “twitter client” and you’ll see plenty of options).
Warning: If you opt for the text message updates – make sure you have an unlimited text plan from your cell phone provider, as some users that you might follow can run your existing text plan up through the roof and beyond…
Go and get yourself a free account and follow LANverse at twitter.com/lanverse – all new blog posts are announced through Twitter.
Pownce.com
“Pownce is centered around sharing messages, files, events, and links with already-established friends. The site launched on June 27, 2007, and was opened to the public on January 22, 2008.” – Wikipedia
Blogger.com
“Blogger was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999. This was in the midst of the dot-com boom. But we weren’t exactly a VC-funded, party-throwing, foosball-in-the-lobby-playing, free-beer-drinking outfit. (Unless it was other people’s free beer.)
We were three friends, funded by doing annoying contract web projects for big companies, trying to make our own grand entrance onto the Internet landscape. What we were originally trying to do doesn’t matter so much now. But while doing it, we created Blogger, more or less on a whim, and thought — Hmmm… that’s kinda interesting.
Blogger took off, in a small way, and eventually a bigger way, over a couple years. We raised a little money (but stayed small). And then the bust happened, and we ran out of money, and our fun little journey got less fun. We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up.
Things were going well again in 2002. We had hundreds of thousands of users, though still just a few people. And then something no one expected happened: Google wanted to buy us. Yes, that Google
We liked Google a lot. And they liked blogs. So we were amenable to the idea. And it worked out nicely.
Now we’re a small (but slightly bigger than before) team in Google focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world’s information from the personal perspective. Which has pretty much always been our whole deal.
For more on Google, check google.com. (Also good for searching.)” – from About page at blogger.com
One site to ping them all… Ping.fm
“Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or Email and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.” – from ping.fm homepage
Once you discover that you can gain access to a lot of knowledgeable people and good content through all the social networking sites (more and more of them are popping up everyday), and of course that you can plug your site on every single one of them (driving traffic to your site), you will need a way to update all the sites at once. This is exactly what Ping.fm is made for. Using any of the client applications/devices mentioned above you can post to all your sites at once.
It get’s even better when you have a wordpress blog ! There is a Ping.fm wordpress plugin that takes your published posts and sends them over to ping.fm, which in turn posts to all your blogs/microblogs and other sites.
In reality, you only need accounts on all the blogging sites, a wordpress blog with the ping.fm plugin and you can let the whole world know whats on your mind, simply by updating your wordpress blog.
Check out Ping.fm for an extensive list of social networking sites. There’s lots of FREE knowledge floating on this internet thing…
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