Social websites is all the rage nowadays. It is good way to keep in touch with friends and one of the few good ways to keep in touch with friends that are too inconveniently located in a distant geographic location.
Heck, they are so useful that I have signed with a fair number of them too. But not all social networking websites are all they are cracked up to be. Some have good interface and good application and then there are some that are very specialized.
And of course everybody should know Facebook.com and Twitter.com, right? If you didn’t know about these very famous online social networking websites, where have you been? Been sticking your head up in the clouds, eh?
Anyway, I signed up with them and well they are some of the better ones around in comparison with say Tagged.com, Hi5.com and Friendster.com. I was a user of Friendster once, it was ok, so-so, but the other two, Tagged and Hi5 they were kind of hopeless with very poor interface.
But when Facebook came along, they took the world by storm. Sure, social networking websites wasn’t something new when they came around, but they did it in a different sort of way that made them one up against their competitors. Their interface was a little nicer to use, still not perfect but still much nicer anyway. And then there is the ability for web developers to write apps for them which increase their user interaction and social networking ability tremendously leaving the other social websites behind in smoke. In addition, Facebook came up with pages that companies or celebrity could use to promote their products and services. That really differentiated Facebook against many other social websites because companies and celebrities can use the viral nature of people to spread the word around. Heck, even the politician uses Facebook pages!
For some entertainment with interaction, you could play Facebook games. Of course playing social games uses up a lot of time, and I found them to be a time waster. Many friends who just signed up recently also spend a lot of time playing with the apps and games. Heh, heh, they will learn soon enough that it is waste of time. The good point about Facebook is its ability to keep in touch with friends by looking at the little bits of comments that they leave here and there. It is quick way of keeping an eye on what your friends are doing. And if you got one of those latest mobile gadgets like iPhone, Android Phone, Windows Mobile, Palm, or like my getting-dated Palm Centro (I’ve just upgraded to Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 running on Android and it is good!), you could post updates on the go!
And yes, you can do that with Twitter too. A micro blogging service that only allows 140 character limit, you need to be brief with your online post. I’m still figuring out how useful Twitter is, but because of its sudden popularity it is now one of the must-haves and in-thing to sign up.
Nowadays, social networking websites are connecting to each other, which mean that if you post something one of them, it gets reposted on the other social website that you have linked together. Cool, eh?
And with a little jiggling here and tweaking there, and cobbling together some open source software, I managed to repost them back to my various social website. Yep, that’s how I make a website with all these connection here and there. It gets a little messy, but I like to loop and link them.
It’s a nice little hobby of mine, making simple things complicated. Hah, when I was playing with multi-boot at one time with my PC, I had as many as 5 operating system in my computer. One day I mentioned it to a computer sales guy and he said he “pengsan” (faint) from what I tried to do! Haha, that’s me!
So here’s more interconnection, a few of my social websites done up in my good old website!
Cheers!
- Vox – blogging via my mobile phone
- Facebook – my wall posts
- Twitter – see my little tweets
- Posterous – blogging via email and helps re-post to other sites that you owned
- Tumblr – some kind of multi-blogging / status update / photo blog platform
- Statusnet – used by Laconica, you can actually set up your own private social website! And so I did! — Unfortunately I have to take it down due to high server resource usage. Will have to toy around and see where to host it next time.
I still got many more social websites, but one just cannot cope with so many. I signed up to look-see what is it all about. And perhaps blog about it in future. Oh, you probably might see the same post on all of the above social websites coz they are somewhat linked to each other!
My social web sites
- Flickr – Sojourn
- Friendster
- Tagged
- Delicious – social bookmarks
- FreeLink – online bookmarks
- Twitter – micro blogging