On social networking

Kit asked in his latest entry about his reader’s opinions regarding social networking and I thought the subject was worth a post in my own blog. So here are my purely technical 2 cents. Wait! Wasn’t this entry about social (you know… people) networking? Never mind.

I use 3 social services mainly for fun and to please the geek in me. These are: del.icio.us, Audioscrobbler and Flickr. Heavily using the bookmark manager (even integrated it with my site), passively but continuously using the music profiler thingie and less the photo service, but less here means that I don’t post to it. I browse it extensively and this is where the social networking part comes in: I use tags to discover stuff that i’m interested in: snowboard, cats, etc and leave comments if I see something that I like. del.icio.us is even cooler: after posting a bookmark there’s a chance you’ll see “and X other people” and clicking the link shows the list of X people who bookmarked the same thing and might or might not have the same interests as you do, and you can browse their bookmarks. You can also do the old fashioned tag browsing as with Flickr or you can dig into the popular links section to see all that’s cool and trendy on the Net, and slap your IM friends with an “oooh, that’s so old” reply when they send you a certain link a day or a few hours later. :) I’m not really into Audioscrobbler because it’s really shaky, I mean it’s got looong downtimes where nearly nothing of interest works on the site. I guess they have serious problems scaling with their ever growing user base.

I briefly tried LinkedIn (recommended by Gabriel) and Orkut (after finally receiving a much sought invite from Gabriela) but I didn’t find anything too appealing in either one. The accounts are there, at least if they haven’t deleted them due to inactivity, but I never re-visited the sites after the initial sign up process.

All right, I’m off to add some deliciously social bookmarks…