Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about how eventually one social network will reign supreme over the social network war the way Google won the search war of the 1990s. The argument goes something like this: The social network that has the most users, is easy enough for grandma to use and makes it possible for you to share all of your digital media will be the dominant social networking site. This argument doesn’t take into account the fact that people use different social networking sites for different reasons. People have different types of conversations in different social environments in “real life” and the same is true on the web. People have different conversations in different types of social networking sites. Here are some of the different ways that I use some of the popular social networks:
Twitter has two primary uses for me. First, I use it to meet and have conversations with new people. I may not know the person in “real life” but would like to meet them so I’ll reach out on Twitter and attempt to forge new friendships. The second use I have for Twitter is as a way of finding great content on the web. I like to follow people that share great content and I find some of the best articles, music and video content out there because of those people. Twitter has replaced my rss feed reader.
Blip.fm
I’ve been having tons of fun on blip.fm lately. I have a blast sharing music and finding new music with it. I’ve met some great people and I enjoy having light conversation with people and coming up with clever ways to incorportate music into those conversations.
Flickr
When I see something odd or noteworthy I’ll snap a shot with my iPhone and quickly upload it to Flickr and leave a little comment. This might be something that doesn’t have much value beyond my immediate interest. I also like to upload all of my photographs to flickr and create groups based upon the events that the photos correspond to. My groups usually correspond to vacations or holidays. My intention is that over time I will have a photographic archive of my life.
I use Facebook to connect to people I already know. I generally post personal content on Facebook that wouldn’t necessarily have value to people that don’t know me. Pictures of my family or information about what I did this weekend goes on Facebook.
I use LinkedIn for connecting to people that I’ve done business with or am hoping to collaborate with in a professional capacity. It is a great way of reconnecting with former coworkers and employers.