Social Network logos

Facebook, Linked In, Xing, Ecademy… I’m starting to get swamped by different social networking systems. What, if any, is the point of adding people as friends / contacts in more than one of these systems? Plus for Linked In, Xing and Ecademy you have to even pay cash to get the full functions. Ecademy is €16.45 a month for its ‘proactive networking’ and LinkedIn is $19.95 a month for a Business account – that’s more than I pay to host all my own websites each month, and that allows me to create my own Global Microbrand via my blog. Facebook is at least free for all its functions, so for that reason it will carry on being my network of choice.

Beyond that I could host my own social network on my own server with ELGG, or on someone else’s server with Ning or ONEsite. I could even start to network things together… Would there be any point of doing so though? Something separate for a political site perhaps?

However one thing I won’t be doing is to join StudiVZ, the German equivalent of Facebook. They need a date of birth in order to signup, and on any Mac browser (Firefox, Safari, Opera) 2 parts of the ‘Geburtstag‘ fields are greyed out and I can’t enter a date – even with popup blocker off, and all javascript etc. enabled. Bit of an oversight when you consider Apple’s growing market share.

Geburtsdatum

5 Comments

  1. I think it is worth waiting for the latest developments of google’s opensocial: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ Best wishes from Berlin

  2. rose22

    I had a bebo account years ago for birthday reminders – I was really surprised when it turned into a social networking site.
    Facebook is my site of choice – more of my friends are on it than anywhere else, I lock my profile as far as possible so I can put photos of my son there for friends to see but they are not more widely accessible.
    Linkedin if quite useful if you’re up for a career chance – it’s a chance to track down uni friends etc.who may be of help now.
    My blog is on http://www.thoughts.com which also offers a platform for podcasts, videos, photos etc. and allows you to invite or sign up friends i.e. it’s yet another social networking site in a way.
    Spare a thought for friends reunited – it’s pretty much been usurped (although I think the original idea still has some worth – you can see what classsmates are up to without having to be in touch with them directly). Bet its owners are glad they sold out to ITV…

  3. Facebook is useful for social diary management, a feature I’d been suggesting Livejournal or similar implement for some time before Facebook was even heard of. Google Calendar was meant to do that, but ended up too clunky and with no real incentive or easy way of organising friendgroups.

    Otherwise, I haven’t bothered with any of the others really, Myspace so I can listen to interesting new bands, but not often.

  4. What you said, about totally disagreeing on politics but agreeing on tech comment…

    DK

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