Social Networking

Addicted to Facebook

Submitted by shabam on Wed, 11/11/2009 - 13:40
in

I've not really been a fan of social media. I like some things, but have never really gotten into the hype. I enjoy posting on YouTube and watching what others post, but I don't comment much and I don't go out of my way to make friends there. Perhaps I should, it might make the service that much more entertaining, but I've not really done it. I tweet some, but not much, I've only got 29 friends on my list. I never got into MySpace and didn't sign up for FaceBook, because I thought it would be just like MySpace, and I didn't care.

Well, I finally signed up on FaceBook because of peer pressure. I signed up three days ago and immediately found a lot of family on there, including my mother and several cousins. I also found some people I've gone to school with, worked with, and others I volunteer with. I then found some people from High School who I've not seen since High School. But, I thought "hey, that's cool. I'll chat with them once or twice and then we will loose connection again." I'm not particularly good at keeping up the connections. I'd like to be, but I guess I'm just too caught up in my own affairs to spend much time thinking about yours. I'm a little selfish, what can I say. One of my biggest faults and they thing I like least about myself, but hey, it's just part of who I am.

They make it easy to keep up by having a list of posts by others for me to read. I don't have to go to my friends sites to keep up with them, there is stuff posted right there for me to read and respond to. And to top it off, after less than three whole days I've already connected with 46 people. The problem with that though is that now there is so much stuff people doing, that I can't keep up. And all the games they are playing!

I have started to play some games on the site. When you play the games, your friends in the games can help you. When you have neighbors in FishVille, they can stop by your tank and clean it for you, or adjust the temperature. You can look at their tanks, send them gifts. It makes keeping in touch very fun, albeit superficial.

I still prefer the personal touch of face to face interactions, but FaceBook makes me respect social media a lot more. I know, I'm a geek, I'm supposed to really be into these geeky things. Maybe this will open some doors for me and make me an even bigger geek. :)

OpenACircle: Social Networking for Business Groups

Submitted by shabam on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 13:32
in

There are a ton of social networking sites. In order for a social site to make it, they need a niche that is different from the others out there, or they need to be a lot better. YouTube has the video social networking tied up, Flickr has pictures, FaceBook and MySpace have the "lets be friends" category tied down. We also have LinkedIn for those looking for work, or people, or wanting to network for business reasons. There are so many other that I'd be here all day just naming them all.

A new player on the market seems to have brought things to a new level. OpenACircle is social networking for groups. You create a circle in which you can share a wall that reminds one of a white board, a meeting calendar, documents and more. This is a great site that allows for great sharing that is private to the group, but allows you to meet others as well.

Is this a new idea though? Not really. Yahoo Groups allows for a lot of this kind of sharing and other sites have attempted it. IBM and Microsoft have products that allow for sharing with businesses. But many of these products are expensive or cumbersome to use. OpenACircle is easier to use and free. This makes it a great competitor.

A couple of problems with the site exist though. For one, they use Java. This limits who can use it. Java is not supported on some older browser and many people turn off Java support. Java also takes a while to load, so is a little slower than some other languages. The second major problem is that they have written the site in a way that does not allow for support of some browsers and operating systems. Currently they support IE and Firefox in Windows only. They are working on support for Mac. They do not support Chrome or Linux and do not seem to have plans to support them. This is too bad as my main browser is Chrome and I like to use Linux.

Like any good site, OpenACircle has some great benefits, and some major drawbacks. I recommend checking it out and seeing if it is something that you can find useful, but keep in mind that it may not be supported on your platform.

Syndicate content