Believe it or not, for more than one year I have an article draft saved in my weblog system, titled "Social Software". The original reason for writing this was that
Dan Diephouse wrote
about
O'Reilly's Connection
, a now defunct social network for geeks. Some days ago
Brett Porter wrote about his experiences with social networks
, and I decided to start over with this blog post.
Being user of some social networks of different flavors, I noted that the number of connections I have in different network differs strongly. One reason is that some network have a larger user base, others make it very hard to add connections, others imply a closeness of relationships that I do not want to share with everyone. So, what level of social relationships does being connected in one network imply?
- Facebook
- Nothing. It basically means "Hey you are on facebook as well!"
- Xing, Plaxo Pulse and LinkedIn
- You might be useful for my career, I better keep you in this network.
- twitter, Last.fm, Flickr
- What you do (listen to, or photograph) is interesting for me
- del.icio.us and Digg
- What you read and think is interesting for me
- Dopplr and Plazes
- If you happen to be in the same place with me, it would be nice to know so we can meet.
The most valuable network for me (apart from the address book synch of Plaxo) is del.icio.us, because it allows me to track and share ideas with people I find interesting and this is despite the poor network capabilities of del.icio.us. So if you would like to connect with me in del.icio.us, just leave a comment with your username,