Social Media Field Guide: Part 3 - Social Networking, Aggregation, Wiki's

(Part 1 Available Here)

(Part 2 Available Here)

Social Networking

Social Networking focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Here are some well know social networking services:

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them and elsewhere

MySpace lets you find friends & classmates, meet new people, listen to free music & build playlists, share photos, watch videos, start a blog, read celebrity news

Linked-in strengthens and extends your existing network of trusted contacts. LinkedIn is a networking tool that helps you discover inside connections to recommended job candidates, industry experts and business partners.

Meetup.com is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies. Users enter their ZIP code (or their city outside the United States) and the topic they want to meet about, and the website helps them arrange a place and time to meet.

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Social Network Aggregation (Click Here)

Social Network Aggregation - Example: Friendfeed

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Social Network Aggregation

Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services, such as MySpace, Facebook and even Twitter. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator, which pulls together information into a single location, or helps a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into one profile. Various aggregation services provide tools or widgets to allow users to consolidate messages, track friends, combine bookmarks, search across multiple social networking sites, read rss feeds for multiple social networks, see when their name is mentioned on various sites, access their profiles from a single interface, provide "lifestreams", etc. Here is a social network aggregator.

Friendfeed is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other types of RSS/Atom feeds. Friendfeed makes content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information

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Wiki's (Click Here)