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Help me orient through the maze of new social mediums
Cognisseur
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey guys,
I'm about to graduate college, move out on my own with my girlfriend, and start graduate school in NYC. As part of it, I want to create some kind of commitment to online communities, whether to share my fun stories or post my pictures or make new friends or stay connected with old friends or to learn new things.
So I've been browsing through various new social mediums, and I'm more confused than I started. I don't want to sit on AIM and Gmail Chat while I update my Facebook and Twitter with links to my Blogspot and Flickr, all the while commenting on forums and Fark. Problem is... I don't know what to go with. To sum up my interests, I want to cast my net wide so that many people end up seeing what I write, both so strangers stumble on what I write and may befriend me and so that current friends don't have to go through too much hassle to stay connected with me.
I can gain new information through forums and will continue to do so, but they don't function nearly as well for keeping in touch with old friends or posting stories about mundane things. Blogs are nice but I have no idea which ones are the popular ones, the easy for non-members to access ones, the easy to connect with new people ones, etc. Twitter seemed interesting but I can't help but feel it's filled with a lot of noise and back and forth public discussions are kind of difficult to track. Not to mention I can't get into the feel of 140 character messages; to me they look like they spread more misinformation and incomplete thoughts than they do facilitate social communication.
What do you guys think? What do you use, what have you used, what do you like/dislike, etc.
I'm about to graduate college, move out on my own with my girlfriend, and start graduate school in NYC. As part of it, I want to create some kind of commitment to online communities, whether to share my fun stories or post my pictures or make new friends or stay connected with old friends or to learn new things.
So I've been browsing through various new social mediums, and I'm more confused than I started. I don't want to sit on AIM and Gmail Chat while I update my Facebook and Twitter with links to my Blogspot and Flickr, all the while commenting on forums and Fark. Problem is... I don't know what to go with. To sum up my interests, I want to cast my net wide so that many people end up seeing what I write, both so strangers stumble on what I write and may befriend me and so that current friends don't have to go through too much hassle to stay connected with me.
I can gain new information through forums and will continue to do so, but they don't function nearly as well for keeping in touch with old friends or posting stories about mundane things. Blogs are nice but I have no idea which ones are the popular ones, the easy for non-members to access ones, the easy to connect with new people ones, etc. Twitter seemed interesting but I can't help but feel it's filled with a lot of noise and back and forth public discussions are kind of difficult to track. Not to mention I can't get into the feel of 140 character messages; to me they look like they spread more misinformation and incomplete thoughts than they do facilitate social communication.
What do you guys think? What do you use, what have you used, what do you like/dislike, etc.
Cognisseur on
0
Posts
Making new friends? Not so easy. It's easy to go into a medium and listen; blogs are the ideal for this, but unless you're super interesting and productive, you're not going to get anyone else to listen. The way you get new friends in an online community is, honestly, to meet them outside a community and join them inside it. To use examples that might apply to me: meet Ruby programmers at a conference > join Twitter, start following, and get followers; meet gamers at a convention > watch blogs, start new blog to share pictures of painted miniatures/whatever.
For friends, I use Facebook. I treat it more like a forum though...I don't sit there posting status updates or joining groups or playing with apps. I put up photo albums when I do something cool. I put up a status update when something cool happens like getting a raise or starting my masters. I contact friends when I plan to visit. I keep AIM up when I'm playing a video game a lot of the time.
For you, it seems like a blog is in your best interest because you want strangers to see what you write. However, this may not work for your friends. I don't know your friends, but mine would not bother to visit a blog site to stay in touch with me unless I was doing something cool like joining the peace corps and going abroad. "Just use Facebook, write notes there if you want" would be the response I would get.
PSN: TheScrublet
I think Facebook has a widget for blogs that posts a status update to your profile whenever you update your feed, so anyone you're friends with on Facebook would see that you updated and have a link to your blog on their Facebook feed.