What’s the Frequency?
No, it’s not the question for Kenneth and it doesn’t have any connection whatsoever with the meaning of that amazing song. It is a catch phrase I love to say when I am talking about ‘Social Network’. What is ‘Social Network’? According to Wikipedia:
A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes.
I like the radio and frequency analogy because since now we have so many ‘social network services’, it is common to say “Do you have ‘name the social network service of your choice’?” when we meet someone new or even our old acquaintance and want to keep in touch with them. For me, it is like we are ‘tuning’ into their frequency and keep on informed about their activities.
Join everything, update nothing
A stolen catch phrase from Satya, which said almost everything about the tendency of many people when joining a particular social network service, myself included. How many of you already registered with this and that social network services and updated them regularly? Probably, you only regularly update 3-5 services and leave the other service unmaintainable or sporadically maintainable. Those services you are regularly maintain are usually the services that your friends and peers updated or used the most too. That is ‘the frequency’.
What are my frequencies?
I love social network services. Not all of them, of course. There are some services polluted with hideous user interface and annoying ‘blink’, which I personally refused to use. I joined almost every services mentioned in the news but at the end of the day, I only updated some which I really love or the one which my peers used (even to my annoyance). So here they are in no particular order:
Ah, the poster child of the latest social network service which doing things correctly. I love the simple interface and its famous ‘applications’. You could even built your own application if you have the skill and it is not so difficult too. With its powerful application feature, Facebook also serves as my ‘gateway’ into other services – almost all those services I’ll mentioned below have a particular Facebook’s application and I could easily updated them by just login into Facebook. This is the service I would love to use and maintain for a very long time. If I have to recommend one service online, I’ll say it clearly ‘Facebook is the one for now’. Here is mine, what’s yours?
Friendster
The least of my favorites. This is the first among social network service and the only reason I am still using it because almost all of my peers are using it. Yeah, when everybody jumped off the cliff, did you follow them? In this case, I did. Just for the sake of conformity and of course prestige (joining since August 2003 – where was you then?), so here’s mine.
My favorite! This service are not particularly categorized as social network service but it served the social network scene right. It has the very essence of ‘the frequency’ since it keep us connected with each other on the notifying based. You were sitting at a beautiful beach, watching sunset with a bottle of orange juice in your hand or maybe you were having a bad mood? Type it on Twitter and all of your Twitter friends will know it. Here’s mine.
del.icio.us
Despite its difficult URL to type and remember but if you are an Internet explorer (not the lousy browser) like me, you will understand the value of an accessible from anywhere bookmark. Del.icio.us delivers that capability and it also shareable. So if you find a nice website or a great article online, put it on your del.icio.us and share it with the world. This is mine.
[flickr]fl
Sharing photos has been one of the thing most of us like to do. With so many online photo sharing services around, flickr is the one that get things right. I even given up my photoblog and now use flickr instead. Of course, you’ll have to pay to get the best of flickr but it is worth every penny. Currently I am not updating flickr as much as I want to (bandwidth problem is one the reason – it is painful to upload photos using my current internet connection) but I will keep on this service alive since I just love it so much. Want to see mine?
Last.fm
Want to share what you are listening now on your computer? Last.fm gives you this ability. I seldom access the main website itself, all I did was launched the application and let it scrobblize my playing list. It is that easy and easiness is one of the strong points of a social network service. Recently, I listen to this.
Not all social network services are just for fun. LinkedIn is one of the ‘serious’ type of service I used. While services like Facebook and Friendster are talking about ‘friends and colleague’, LinkedIn is talking about ‘business associate’. I use this service for greater exposure of my resume and while it didn’t give me a particular benefit until now, it doesn’t hurt to keep this one alive and updated. Who knows if one day a good job offer will brighten up my day? Here’s mine
Those are the most updating services of mine. There are many services that I used sporadically from time to time, among them:
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Pownce (I like this one, but it really hasn’t grow into me yet, we’ll see),
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Tumblr (The power of microblogging, I would love to use this service more often, maybe later),
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43things (I think I am not want much now),
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43places (I am not traveling as much as I used to do now),
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Jaiku (I am satisfied with Twitter but I’ll keep Jaiku around because it shows some potential),
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IconBuffet (If you are an icon collectors like me, you’ll love this one)
and of course, there are many others which I sort of forget now – I’ll mention them from time to time later on.
So, what’s your frequency?