The ubiquitous nature of social networking has become a major boon in this age of web solutions and emerging technologies. There have been so many improvements in what was once referred to as “Knowledge Management” as a platform, and now is “social networking” at its core. No longer are we bound by even modern tools, such as email, for delivering those new pictures of the kids; we now have photo sites a plenty. Just eight or nine years ago, someone came up with a site called “LiveJournal” to allow people to “journal” their everyday lives. This also grew into a solution for social networking and one of the earliest blogging platforms out there. Again, taking the idea of email or forum communications a step further. People could speak their minds and others could comment on it; a personal diary with larger audience.
Today we see many sites and tools cropping up giving us tremendous advantages for sharing our world with our family and friends — or even strangers — on the web. We express ourselves, our ideas, and deliver our personal touch to the world. This is where social becomes so much more than just effectively letting that small email list of yours know what’s going on; now, you have an audience.
So let’s look at the tools that make everyone get their 15 minutes (or maybe almost forever) of fame, while allowing them to be social.
- Blogging: Blogs are a way of writing all of your blathering for everyone on the Internet to read. You know, like, this one! It’s a way to force your words, and way of thinking, onto other people. Or, sometimes, it’s a great way to communicate ideas and thoughts that others may find helpful or useful. I’m hoping you’ll be reading this blog for the latter reason.
- RSS Feeds: This is an extension of a lot of web tools and websites. Most - if not all - blogs have an RSS feed. It’s a kind of list - in a special format - that can be read by specific programs or web browsers. The idea is a way to aggregate information into a simple protocol that can easily be translated by many programs and computers all over the world. Kind of like an easy to understand database… but, if you’re here, you probably knew that already.
- Video sites: YouTube is a prime example of how people deliver their thoughts, rants, and sometimes content they want others to see. It gives even the most novice of the web surfers a way to create a video log or just share with their family and friends. Years ago, you had to hope someone could actually receive and download your giant video email attachment, now it’s all streaming to you in high-def!
- Photo sites: Flickr is probably one of the most popular of the photo-sharing websites. But it’s not just sharing of your photos. You get so much more out of Flickr than just a way to let people see your pictures. You can organize them into albums, tag them for easy searching, and you can also add special geo-tagging to them, allowing people to see just where you were standing; attaching the GPS data directly to the photo. Thanks to the way digital cameras work today, others can see what kind of camera you used to photograph the picture and even what f-stop you used when you did. The benefit isn’t just a bunch of stats, either. You can look at what someone did with a certain kind of camera and say: “wow, I can do THAT with MY camera? Cool!” It lets you understand a little more about the quality you get from your own photographs and learn a little about photography in the process. Education AND eye-candy… Neat!
- Micro-blogging sites: Twitter is by far the most popular of these sites. Micro-blogging is the process of writing a short (140 character) thought and pushing it out to the web. There’s nothing like creating a Twitter account and just watching what mundane things people are saying about their own lives. Sometimes, you run into some awesome people who have wonderful things to say all of the time, but even they get into the simplistic “life blogging” of stuff like “I just ate a chicken sandwich.” However, this same site, with a very nice open API lets you do neat things to let people know what’s going on in the world - yours or the larger. It’s kind of like a quick check-in to see if your friends are still breathing. If they’re decent Twitterers, then you have a shot at knowing what’s going on. Interestingly, the average age of a Twitterer is 37! You’d think it’d be a thing for the young only, wouldn’t you?
- Social Network sites: Facebook comes to mind, here. You can argue that other sites even like “Classmates” or “MySpace” offer a similar service, but at a definite cost and varying quality. Facebook has generated a tremendous amount of interest from both young and older and it’s a great way to find all of those lost friends from high school, grade school, college, work, and even family. Of course, you kind of have to have people’s email addresses to really make this work out. At any rate, Facebook allows you to communicate what’s going on in your world but through a series of “applications” that bolt onto the main Facebook site. This is actually quite useful in the sense that you can not only do silly things like taking quizzes with your friends, but you can let them know what books your reading, music and movies you like, show them pictures, and even share a quick thought or two. Connections to other tools such as Twitter let them see a status of your day, as well. This is like a blog without having to take the time to actually write it all out. You click on a picture of a book, saying you read it, and suddenly you have an entry of what you’ve done and others can either be interested or ignore it. Got that great new achievement in some XBox game? Great! You can show that off, too! You didn’t have to do anything but set up your gamertag — the rest was totally automatic.
Putting it all together
Gluing this stuff together is where the real “Web 2.0″ and “social networking” is going to make everything awesome. You need something - or a bunch of things - to let people know what’s going on and allow them to get to your information easily. Let’s take a look at a “linked” scenario of how the above tools can work together to create a journal of a day without ever having to really write anything major.
Say you’re going on a trip - business or vacation fun - and you’ve got a couple of devices you can use, or maybe you opt for just something simple like your cool cellphone. Now, I’m not talking about anything too fancy, here. Most people these days carry a phone that has both text services as well as the Internet on it. With that, and a camera built it, you can tell a pretty cool story during the day. If your phone happens to have GPS capabilities built in, you have a little more detail to your story, and if you’ve got a PDA phone, you can almost write a book with something that fits in the palm of your hand. Back to the idea… So, you’ve got your cameraphone with text and Internet on it. You also have a Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and a Facebook account. No problem! You’ve got a full life-blogging suite in your hands!
You get up the morning of your trip and you’re tired. You feel the desire to express this to the world, but don’t feel like writing a long journal or blog entry, so you quickly text a message to your Twitter account that says “Man, I’m really beat this morning, but I have to travel.” In seconds, your friends know you’re awake, alive, tired, and heading out the door and won’t be home. Of course, this can work against you if you allowed someone to know this information who might do you some harm - like rob your house - so always be careful what you tell “the world at large.” After that, you pack your bags, Twitter that, eat breakfast, Twitter that, head to the airport and arrive, Twitter that too, and then sit and sip on a Latte while you wait for your plane - heck, let’s Twitter that bit, too. People know where you are. This is handy if a spouse or friend wants to know if they can get a hold of you, today. If you Twittered: “Getting on the plane and switching off phone” people know they can’t call you - pretty cool!
So, while you’re sitting drinking your latte, you see something cool in one of those airport shops, or maybe you just like the look of some plane on the runway. Quickly, you switch to your camera on your phone and shoot a pic or two. Now, maybe you find some sign funny, or something, and what do you do to share this with your friends? You upload it to Flickr! But wait, there’s more to this. While you were still at home, you also had created an account on a site called “TwitterFeed.com” which lets you “tweet” (That’s what Twitter messages are called by the in crowd) anything you might be able to get from an RSS feed! Wow, cool! So, hmm… hey, my Flickr account has an RSS feed that has information on all new pictures that I’ve taken! Great! I can now upload a photo to Flickr and TwitterFeed will post the information about it in Twitter (with a link to my Flickr photo!) so my friends know I took a picture. Hey, that’s pretty slick! Aww, but I wanted that on my Facebook account, too. Now I have to upload it there, as well.
Say, while I’m taking pictures and sipping lattes, I decide I’ll listen to some music on my iPod. I wish I could tell some of my friends what I’m hearing ’cause I think they’ll like some of these songs! I just discovered some of these new songs and bands through Pandora.COM, and wanted to share, but I didn’t have time. Do I Twitter? I could, couldn’t I, but I see someone — or something — funny that’s moving around. I need to shoot this with video to get the point across - I just have to! I decide to do this with my phone and then upload it to my YouTube account. Hey that’s pretty cool! Now they can laugh, too!
Now I’m trying to deal with all of these different places where I’m putting stuff. Facebook kind of helps put this together ’cause I can add little applications that show off my YouTube and Flickr photos. In fact, with a quick sync of my iPod, I can use an add-on to iTunes — called Last.FM — to let them know what I listened to! Facebook has an application to display that, too! Hey, now that’s pretty cool! That has an RSS feed, too! Let’s add that to TwitterFeed.com and let them know what I heard so they can check them out, too. Hmm, that’ll have to wait until I get back and sync my iPod, but that’s OK. Oh, wait, now I’ve got even more to deal with. At least it’ll do it on its own when I get back. Cool!
I still have this problem of how I deal with all of this content I’m collecting and want to deliver to YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr. In comes a solution called “ShoZu“. This application will download and run on almost any phone - probably the one in your pocket - and can also help you upload stuff to the aforementioned services via MMS (multi-media service) messaging, as well, if you don’t want to — or can’t — download and application onto your phone. You create an account at ShoZu, set up a couple of services like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, then BAM! You now have a tool to consolidate from where you send stuff AND, it’ll do it in the background. No more logging into each of these sites and sending things one-by-one. You start up ShoZu, click on a service, like Flickr, and then select a bunch of pictures you want to send. Do the same for stuff you want in your YouTube account, and again for stuff you want up in Facebook - or just let Facebook apps consolidate the information in that “life feed” we’ve been building with RSS feeds and TwitterFeed. Once you click on the stuff you want uploaded through ShoZu, it takes care of the rest, in the background and will even Geo-Tag pictures you just took! You can even have ShoZu pop-up as soon as your done shooting pictures or video and ask you if you want to send it up now and to where. Now THAT is efficient and just plain cool!
Wow, I haven’t even left the airport and I’ve got a ton of stuff to tell my family and friends. Imagine what I can do once I arrive at my destination!
I’m not going to go through all of that, but you get the point. My little scenario was a way to describe a small sampling of the collaborative tools which let you communicate with friends, family, and the rest of the world. It’s not even that hard to set up! Beyond the beauty of you communicating with them, they can communicate with you, too. Each of these tools — like Twitter and Flickr — let others add replies and comments to your items. Now you have a full social discussion with your “life blog” and it even has some permanence.
So, have a look at some of these tools, set them up, try them out and see if you can’t communicate with your friends and family a little better! It sure beats email! …and it was wireless, to boot!
UPDATE! 02-26-2008, My brother-in-law pointed out a really cool utility to bring this all together, as well. Well, he twittered it. See! I told you this stuff works! The product/website - which is free - is called “FriendFeed“. This solution allows you to aggregate a whole bunch of different sites into one singular feed; kind of like what you can do with Facebook and all of its bolt-on applications. But it provides an RSS feed of everything. So, when I return a rental movie to Blockbuster, it updates my personal RSS feed and, of course, updates FriendFeed because I have that as a something I want to publish. You can add Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, and a whole lot more. Check it out and see if this doesn’t help the wonderful world of Life Blogging and social networking!
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