Value of social networks

I have been asked several times what’s the value of getting involved in online social networks so here are my 4 ¢ (adjusted for inflation) on that topic. 😉

Most social networking services have been designed differently (technology, functionality, features…) with different customers/segments in mind, but all of them share one common theme, enabling people to socialize and build online communities.

Services such as LinkedIn are geared towards one’s professional life with focus on marketing and positioning yourself towards that next great career move. They have recently started to expand their capabilities and cross-promotional activities with other sites such as Twitter (I’ll get to this site later) which expands their reach even further. I would recommend this site to all professionals who want to improve their marketability and expand their professional network.

Then you have Facebook, a social networking site whose premise is to enable you to connect with your friends and stay up to date with what is happening in their lives. You can share photos, videos and use an ever expanding application pool. It’s a site that has been growing rapidly internationally and has undergone a major design change several months ago which wasn’t appreciated at first by many users, but has since proven to have been a solid decision. FB allows you to connect with those long lost friends by simply entering their name in the search field and while this was beneficial to me in connecting with family and friends from Serbia, Bosnia, Cyprus,…I can see how this can become a problem for some as certain past friendships are best left alone. Now, not to scare anyone away from using this service it is important to know that people can look for you be default unless you limit your search visibility in the account settings.

One of the first sites to enter this market was certainly MySpace , “an international site that offers email, a forum, communities, videos and weblog space” according to their own description. While similar in idea to Facebook (they actually seem to be replicating each others’ functionality as time goes by), they are different in the sense that you can pick your user name to be anything you want it to be. You can enter a fake name in FB as well, but the design and principle ideas are different. By being among the first to enter the market they have grabbed a significant market share, but have since stagnated a bit and allowed for their new features to arrive late when compared to those of their competitors. It is still a major social networking site, but its appeal and usability has significantly decreased in my eyes.

Next up is Twitter, a micro-blogging site which can be easily explained as a stream of real-time status updates. You have 140 characters per update to tell others “What are you doing?” That is the default question anyway, but people talk about anything and everything on Twitter which can be both interesting and annoying. Major advantage for me is the ability to read what some of the companies are working on (yes, some major businesses are tweeting away); hear what’s happening in the Information Technology field from some of the leaders of the industry as well as stay current on the latest news. There were several instances over the past year or so where certain news agencies have tweeted info before it really went live on their websites or channels which is pretty cool. I also enjoy the ability to interact with people from all around the world, exchange ideas and opinions which otherwise wouldn’t be as easy.

Last, but not least service I want to mention is Plurk. It is “a social journal for your life” as its tag line reads. Plurk came on the scene several months ago when Twitter was experiencing scalability issues (aka. growing pains) and has since stuck around. It takes a slightly different approach from twitter in presenting its time line, but it is still a micro-blogging/status updating service.

In order to limit the length of this already lengthy post I only mentioned five services I frequently use. Dozens of others are also available, some are more localized to a country, language or a region, but overall options are “limitless”. One of the services I haven’t used yet, but will try out over the next couple of weeks is FriendFeed, frequently praised by Robert Scoble on Twitter. 🙂 So I figured I’ll give it a shot and see how I like it.

So after reading all of this some of you might still wonder, what’s the point. Value comes from the interactivity, community, business relationships, friendships,…all online without any physical or geographical limitations. I tried not to list specific examples of potential benefits as I find that people will often discover solutions addressing their own needs as they interact with these services.

Already on social networks and have an opinion about them? What do you like, what don’t you like, what could be improved, what’s missing?