Lindsey's Musings

There are countless social sites that exist that one can become a part of these days but when it comes to finding those I haven’t used before, it makes for an awkward post considering my obsession with trying out betas of new tools and websites.  I’ve sometimes gone to a website and tried to sign-up only to realize that my email is already in use because at one point or another I had already taken it for a test drive.  My lack of memory can sometimes stem from the fact that these sites and tools go through some massive functionality changes and face lifts between the time they first enter beta to when they actually become popular and I hear about them again.  It is also because I will fully admit that while I love to play around with them, sometimes my time spent with them is very shallow and I try to avoid putting myself into the dilemma of “now how do I personally use this” and the even more frightening “this is really cool but I still like x and y features of [insert competitor tool/site name here].”  What is a girl to do?  Sometimes I wish I could just mash two sites together and create the ultimate solution.

There’s also the problem of a newer tool being tagged by me as “awesome” but it relies on other people I know using it and they are already entrenched in the databases of other websites serving generally the same purpose.  The good news is that one can often find ways of doing something once, and having it propagated to all these different sites like Facebook and Twitter.  TweetDeck is a good example of this which lets you simultaneously post to both.  I think it’s important to remember though, that just because it has been made easy to reach out to the users of these different sites in one click, you may not want to use the sites in the same way and if you really want to take an interest, you’re also going to have to be able to monitor responses which is another whole different beast to tackle.

So what sites would I like to try, revisit or perhaps use better than what I currently am doing now?  Well I’m glad you asked…

1. Plurk

This site is a lot like Twitter in the sense that it revolves around sharing short status updates of 140 characters or less.  It has some very unique features though like the ability to select colorful “qualifiers” which are words (verbs) that start off the “plurk” which is the equivalent of a “tweet.”  This makes it easy to identify the type of plurk when you’re panning through their equally neat horizontal-scrolling timeline where yours and your friend’s plurks appear.  Not only does the timeline give me an opportunity to use the normally neglected side-scrolling button on mouse, but it’s kind of fun to see the time relationship of your plurks with your friends.  Like Twitter, you can also share links to media and have followers but Plurk actually lets you comment on specific Plurks in a nested fashion like a blog post.  There are also some achievement-based awards to keep up the participation such as a karma score (although I’m not sure what this really affects) and earnable badges.

I know that many Second Life users like to use this and although it may never take over Twitter, I think it has its charms and potential uses if there’s an application that can benefit from how it displays the information and resulting conversation or you want to gain access to a niche community that uses it (which is my personal aim).  Some other blog posts of interest that comment on Plurk’s place within the microblogging world (although dated) include Plurk versus Twitter: They’re Not the Same, and Here’s Why and Plurk: Like Twitter, in good and bads ways.  Apparently Microsoft China found it interesting enough to even copy it.  If anyone has seen a site that has formatted their tweets in a graphic timeline like Plurk I’d be anxious to see it!

2. Tumblr

This is a “short-blog” or microblogging site that I actually signed up for when it came out but never used to any extent.  One of its advantages is how easy and simple it is to add content.  From the dashboard, you can easily add text, photos, quotes, links, chat logs, audio, and video.  You can also email your post like Posterous.  There’s somewhat of a catch though which is that you can only really include one type of media in a single post (except for text since you can always add captions).  It is limiting but that is kind of the point.  Tumblr has actually setup a page to showcase why different types of users (like companies) would like Tumblr.  In the same vein as Twitter, it also lets you follow tumblr blogs and there’s a “reblogging” feature which is like retweeting.  In fact, Twitter actually uses Tumblr for their status page.  Another nice feature is the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and have the information automatically posted to your blog.  It can act as an aggregator of sorts.  The reason I’m interested in this is because I’m looking for simple options to post things that may be too big or inappropriate for a tweet but too short or lack enough substance to fit a “regular” blog either.  I have an idea of using Tumblr blogs for tracking the progress of different facets or just regular short progress updates of some larger effort.  Big milestone updates or summary posts based on the collected content of the smaller, “sidebar-relegated” Tumblr blogs would then appear on the main blog.  I’m hoping that made sense.

3. NING

This is a site that I also created an account on a long time ago in early 2007 and it looks like it has gone through many changes since.  It is essentially allows you to create your own social network…fast.  Members can sign up and have their own profile pages, add media like videos and pictures, participate in discussion boards, have their own blogs, form groups, etc.  My biggest pet peeve about this site is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of searching for existing networks.  The options they give you to explore are extremely limited and I’m not entirely sure why.  Although I’ve played around with creating a network and modifying it, I have not actually participated in one but that will change in a couple weeks when I do the No Impact Experiment which uses a NING network to allow those participating to communicate and share their experiences.  I think this is a great use of the site’s offerings and I look forward to giving it a try.  One of the things I’ll be focusing on is why it’d be worth it to start your own social network on NING rather than just create a group of Facebook.

4. Digg

In all the years I’ve been on the Internet, I don’t think I have ever hit a “Digg This” button.  When trying to come up with a logical reason as to why, I think it’s because I actually don’t read a lot of blogs.  Sure I get linked to about a dozen a day along with various YouTube videos but I’ve just never felt compelled to use it.  After spending time on it today, I’ve found that like StumbleUpon, it is a great place to get linked to content I would otherwise probably never see.  I should have known this earlier as I have watched the (usually hilarious) internet show DiggNation which is based on covering the top Digg sites.  To remedy this, I signed up for the “Best of Digg in your Email” mailing list and I plan to more actively contribute to the voting process.

5. Delicious

This is another site that I do have an account on and have occasionally used but have never taken full advantage of which is why I’m going to cheat a little and list it here.  It is a social bookmarking site where you can tag your saved links and share them with others.  I was essentially just using it as an online copy of my bookmarks which was useful but the site can be used for so much more like the discovery of new links that I’d be interested in.  The site’s homepage shows the top bookmarked sites which makes it somewhat like Digg, but thanks to the tagging feature, you can also search for a topic or a particular tag, subscribe to a tag and get notified when new relevant links are added, and see who else shares bookmarks with you and maybe go take a peek into their collection to see if they have similar interests which could lead to a goldmine of new resources.  I would like to start using Delicious in these ways.  One of the issues I wrestle with though is how I use it while also using Diigo, another social bookmarking site that has the added benefit of highlighting and annotating.  I can automatically send my Diigo’d links to Delicious, but the minimalist in me weeps at the thought of being involved in more than one social bookmarking site when it honestly wouldn’t hurt me or take any extra effort.  Am I the only one experiencing this aversion?

If there is any theme to this post, it is that there is almost always alternatives to every social media site or tool out there and it can often be hard to choose which ones to use and for what.  While coming up with my list of five sites I want to use in the future, I had some specific purposes or applications in mind for four out of the five choices.  I want to use them to get a better feel for how they work and how other people use them, which will also help me figure out how I can personally apply them as a part of my own personal endeavor when it comes to issues of communication, collaboration, education and entertainment.   Now the next step is to figure out- how do I possibly keep up with all these sites that are constantly pumping out content and expect my contributions as well?  And more importantly just starting out, how do I use these different social media sites together efficiently and effectively?  I already gave this some thought in my discussion of Tumblr but this is the question that I am really set out to answer over the next couple of weeks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 3:29 am and is filed under Assigned Topic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.