Social Networking 2
Roy Johnson
How – or whether – you use services online for social networking and social media in general depends on what you want to get out of it. The whole point of the Web 2.0 trend is that is gives users choice of community, content and level of participation.

Here are some outlines of the more famous services.

Facebook
www.facebook.com
This is the big one. Six years old now and with a claimed membership of 400 million around the world – half of whom use the service daily. Facebook started with a more “serious” profile of users than the teen favourite MySpace but it has both grown and lightened up since then. Many professionals do use it heavily for communication and keeping track of colleagues and contacts. There is a mobile phone version as well.

Twitter
  twitter.com
What makes Twitter so popular is that it is custom-built for phones (SMS-style 140 character limit on the size of tweets) but can be used or read online as well. It is a very fast and user-friendly way to stay in touch and share news with your circle, whether that is one person or thousands. It has just launched advertising as well so it looks set to grow further.

MySpace
www.myspace.com
This was the original social networking phenomenon – massive growth among young users. It’s far from dead, though its rise seems to have peaked as users moved on to other services. There is still heavy usage among teens, chatting and sharing content like images, video clips and music. Quite a few celebs maintain their profiles on this service but – be warned! – profiles are sometimes fake.

LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com
Alongside Naymz and Plaxo, this is a specialised service for professionals and working people to maintain their public profiles and stay in touch with friends and colleagues. It seems to be the leader among such services but its features are limited by definition of its narrow focus. The downside is that users don’t always remember to update when they move or change jobs but LinkedIn is a handy resource for the people who use it properly.

Flickr
www.flickr.com
Originally just an online photo storage and sharing system, Flickr has grown to dominate this area and now falls under the Yahoo umbrella. It is a very busy service with some exceptional work, from amateur to professional – and the chat that goes on around the images is just as much part of the experience as the pictures themselves.

Skype
www.skype.com
This was the poster-child for voice over IP (VOIP) services that provide voice communication between computers. You can now go to voice or video on most of the messenger services like Yahoo Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, ever since VOIP became legal in this country a few years ago, but Skype still leads in terms of features and sound quality (in this writer’s opinion). It offers a mobile version and a service that connects internationally to real phones (landline or mobile). You have to pay for that but the basic VOIP service is free – and also runs video if you want.