Lindsey's Musings

This will probably come as no surprise, but I chose to create a social network with Ning for my Sprout Change project introduced a couple weeks ago.  Although I can see benefits for having a presence on LinkedIn and Myspace, a main focus of this project is to get my neighbors involved with me on this.  Ning provides a great toolset and platform for real sharing and participation.  Originally I was going to test it against just having a Facebook group or page for the project but I think a good point was made by Gorza in the article on why you should Consider Ning to Broaden Social Networking Strategy-

If you’re on Facebook and Twitter, they’re really noisy these days…there’s a lot of what I call absentee activism. But on this thing, you have people who are truly interested.

Also, Ning offers many capabilities that add flexibility that would otherwise be absent on Facebook or even Myspace.  This isn’t to say that I won’t be making a presence on both of these networks.  Although I personally detest Myspace (I foresee a future blog post on this subject), I am willing to make a presence on there if it will connect me with more people.  It helps that Hootsuite just integrated with Myspace also making it easier to keep track of activity on there.  The real goal is to direct people who don’t know about the project to my website/blog, help get the news out of new content for those that support the project and are friends, and hopefully, if they are serious about it, get them to participate and actually share and teach other on the Ning network.  In my opinion, Myspace is far too spammy to really facilitate any real type of consistent conversation on the page outside of the blog discussions and Facebook news streams are filled with news from a hundred other different people and it’s easy to miss things.  The Ning network on the other hand is dedicated to just this project.  LinkedIn will be useful when connecting with professionals that could actually help me out with the project along with other professional ventures in my life but for this assignment I really focused on Ning.

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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…

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