With the growing prevalence of social networking (at least ones that have some main stream popularity…sorry FriendFeed), I am (and have been) striving to find an efficient way to use them to share content. Each of them covers a slightly different niche and potentially reaches a different audience (if it reaches one at all :-(…)
Facebook has always been ground zero for me, since some point in 2005 when it first hit the scene. Slowly it has pushed things like IM more to the backburner leaving that mainly for communication with family or close friends. As Facebook has branched out into a large platform adding the ability to share things such as photos and videos and more significantly post status updates, it has become an increasingly convenient way to share my life with my extended network of friends and see what is up in their lives. In many ways the inherent visibility sometimes limits what I want to throw up there. I don’t necessarily want to constantly flood my feed with every thought feeling or detail of my life, so it doesn’t necessarily fulfill all that I want to offer to the world.
At some point in 2007, I began to use Twitter as a means to supplement this blog, giving me a way to provide more consistent updates on even more inane topics. I am much more willing to throw up darker feeling from my life there and more random thoughts (Rangers!) than I would on Facebook. Much of this is because I have a much smaller (near zero) group of followers there, so it feels like I am talking into a vacuum, providing a nice sounding board. (mixed metaphor…yikes!) Twitter provides an interesting way to peer into the lives of people whom I otherwise wouldn’t be able to…athletes, celebrities, journalists, tech-heads, etc. This is endlessly entertaining and it is fun to be a part of their daily lives. It is a bit disappointing that I haven’t been able to cultivate a group of friends to share in the experiences in a more social manner…this shows my lack of skills in the social world.
So defining the niches I have already established for Facebook and Twitter, where does that leave Google Buzz? Well that is the very question I am asking myself…I mean I certainly don’t have to use every social network that comes around, but I like to feel a part of a community…even if it highlights my inadequacies. After playing around with Google Buzz for a couple days it strikes me as the most significant feature it offers is the ability to look at what people are saying “nearby.” Twitter and Facebook really don’t provide a good location based service and I think this may compete well against services like FourSquare and Gowalla. I also like the feed integration and the way it connects to my other Google services. Unfortunately, again it highlights my lack of social standing. My list of Google contacts/friends is remarkably small, so it suffers a bit in the same way as Twitter in that the real social interaction aspects are currently missing for me. I can see that changing as adoption increases in the near future, but until then it may become another “sounding-board” for my thoughts…or perhaps a content aggregator of my other sources (i.e. shared items on Google Reader and photos on Flickr). Finally, it does as quite a bit of beef to my Google profile which is quickly looking like a place I may want to direct the loads and loads of interested parties (ha!) to my information.
I guess as everything is…this will just have to be a work-in-progress and worth another thought
0 comments:
Post a Comment