Christopher Hatch

These are probably the big 3 so called “social” networking sites (I’m not sure what the point of the word social is, what’s the other choice? Anti-Social networking where people go to discuss their ASBOs?)

I’m interested in discovering how people are using these, and more importantly – are they using them differently.

For a while I linked up Twitter and Facebook – this annoyed Facebook users who didn’t want their stream littered with all the Tweets. (They are presumably happy with latest quiz results and finding out “What type of fruit you are?”)

Step 2 was to use selective twitter and use the #fb hash-tag to update Facebook if I thought it was interesting enough. In fairness nothing is that interesting but less stops FB being swamped.

Then we come to Ping.fm – used by the great and the good to update millions of networks at once. Brightkite, Jaiku, YouAre, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn all updated with one swift click.

This has always struck me as an impersonal way of updating a status – mainly because of this nagging belief I have that different audiences really don’t want the same message.

Twitter anything goes – in the main it’s just noise. Apparently you can lose followers by mentioning Britain’s Got Talent too much (it was more than @4NBrentCross could take) but the mix of business, pleasure, commentary, links, reviews and randomness seems to work.

Facebook – I’m not too sure what the point of Facebook is. I think I am concluding that it serves little point from a business point of view. From a keeping in touch aspect it might serve some point, however I’m fairly sure I don’t really have 300 ‘friends’ and I expect a fair number of them couldn’t care less what I’m doing anyway.

LinkedIn is the mystery one – does anyone ever read status updates on it? If so why? What are they looking to get from it. It’s business orientated so linking Twitter to it is pointless for most Tweets, the groups – well the ones I read are so slow moving as to be almost moribund.

As an aside Brightkite - might be worth a look – especially if you want to “target” people near you. Also Mobypicture is useful if you want to share images and video around the web.

All in all I’m not sure what this post is about now but perhaps it is saying treat individual “networks” as just that – individual, try to target the people you are communicating with information that is relevant to them and where they are reading it.