silva rerum

where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter

I am a huge devotee to social media and all sorts of exper­i­mental Web 2.0 stuff. Long before Twitter became main­stream, I had read about it on Lifehacker ages ago and signed up but thought it was pretty silly, con­sid­er­ing I’d be tethered to my laptop. But that’s just one story of how I was ingra­ti­ated into Web 2.0, here are all of my stories:

Xanga (http://​www​.xanga​.com)
Status: Defunct
This one, like every­one else, I joined in high school. I wasn’t really join­ing it because of any keen interest in it, but because I wanted to con­form. Nevertheless, I always aimed to have a really cool, per­son­al­ized lay­out with which SM assisted. I was only mar­gin­ally know­ledge­able about Photoshop back then, and derived much of my work off other tem­plates and graph­ics. I even­tu­ally aban­doned it when every­one else did the same.

Friendster (http://​www​.friend​ster​.com)
Status: Defunct
This was some­thing akin to a one night stand; Kevin joined it and invited me so I joined it too. I even­tu­ally figured that social media (or at least Friendster) was on its way out so I quit pretty quickly.

Flickr (http://​www​.flickr​.com)
Status: Dormant
After I bought my cool new Canon SD200 way back when, I wanted to store my pic­tures online. However, I didn’t have any­where to put them; Shaw mem­ber accounts only gave us 10MB which was really pro­hib­it­ive. I found Flickr on my own and uploaded them there, long before Yahoo! bought it and enforced the Yahoo! accounts upon it. I remem­ber back then, they had life­time pro accounts…now I wish I had bought one!

Facebook (http://​www​.face​book​.com)
Status: Active; high-​activity
I joined Facebook the sum­mer I returned from Shad Valley to keep in touch with my Dalhousie Shads. C, intro­duced it to me, at work one day; and I was quite puzzled – how was I to use it? What was the point? Little did I know, every­one would end up join­ing Facebook and it would become ubi­quit­ous. I spent many a dull after­noon dur­ing that sum­mer on Facebook.

Youtube (http://​www​.you​tube​.com)
Status: Active; moderate-​activity
This one doesn’t need an explan­a­tion; who isn’t on Youtube?!

Last​.fm (http://​www​.last​.fm)
Status: Active; low-​activity
Last​.fm came because I wanted to record my musical tastes (I cringe at my love of Disney music) and find some cool new tunes to listen to. It was really easy to set up and I prob­ably got the idea from Lifehacker, but I ended up find­ing new artists and songs which I thought was so cool. Now, they’ve put in a sub­scrip­tion fee sort of thing so I don’t use them to find new music, but I still like to record what I listen to!

Twitter (http://​www​.twit​ter​.com)
Status: Active; high-​activity
After hear­ing Gina Trapani gush about the use­ful­ness of Twitter, I wanted to get in on the action too! Sadly, I found out that I could only edit it with the use of a com­puter (web) or by cell­phone and, being on a pay-​as-​you-​go plan, I couldn’t really afford the lat­ter option. So I signed up, let my Twitter account grow stag­nant, then picked it up again when I had my laptop for school. I’ve never looked back since.

Linkedin (http://​www​.linkedin​.com)
Status: Active; low-​activity
While I was on my sum­mer intern­ship in the HR depart­ment, I learned about LinkedIn and was rather skep­tical of its use. Seemed like a glor­i­fied brag­ging web­site where CEOs and CFOs could stare each other down by list­ing achieve­ments and action items; dir­ect reports and deliv­er­ables. But I signed up any­way, think­ing “why not?” Since then, I still update my LinkedIn page (which appears near the top in a Google search for my name) but I don’t really expect to get a job out of it. Has it really got­ten a job for any­one? Let me know.

Shelfari (http://​www​.shel​fari​.com) and LibraryThing (http://​www​.lib​ra​r​ything​.com)
Status: Defunct
Just like Last​.fm, I wanted to keep track of the books I read (and hope­fully get recom­mend­a­tions). However, Shelfari ended up being point­less because of its spam and LibraryThing became a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice. Boo! I want a good book cataloguing-​social media web­site. Is that so much to ask? I don’t recom­mend either of these sites.

Edit: Since Tim from LibraryThing was kind enough to offer his input, I’m revis­ing my eval­u­ation of LibraryThing. It was always a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice (I must have found out after regis­ter­ing and felt ripped off – that hap­pens when you don’t read the fine print, kids). And, of course, it’s far super­ior to Shelfari which I added to my blocked senders list after I kept receiv­ing spam emails from them. So if you want to get your money’s worth, LibraryThing’s your best bet – soph­ist­ic­ated, friendly and non-​spamming. (Though if you are, as most starving stu­dents are, hard up for cash for such lux­ur­ies, you could always save up to join.)

RememberTheMilk (http://​www​.remem​ber​themilk​.com)
Status: Dormant
Lifehacker simply adores RTM (and its con­form­a­tion into the GTD man­tra) but I find it strange and awk­ward. Probably because I don’t have a smart­phone (yet) but hope­fully I’ll end up using it pro­lific­ally with my soon-​to-​be-​purchased Blackberry? Perhaps RTM will reawaken like Twitter!

CiteULike (http://​www​.citeu​like​.org) and Dopplr (http://​www​.dopplr​.com)
Status: Active; low-​activity
So only recently joined these two but they’re pre-​emptive sort of things. CiteULike is use­ful for me (and will con­tinue to be use­ful) as I con­tinue to read aca­demic art­icles and do research; it’s cool to read the CiteGeist (list­ings of pop­ularly cited art­icles) to keep my fin­ger on the pulse as research con­tin­ues to be done. Dopplr is for the future, when I will be trav­el­ling the world, hope­fully meet­ing new people and mak­ing new friends. I haven’t figured out the ins and outs of Dopplr yet, but I’ll assuredly try to use it to its full potential!

Hunch (http://​www​.hunch​.com)
Status: Active; low-​activity
I saw this in G’s Twitter one day and was curi­ous. I’ve signed up using an invit­a­tion and am rather amused but per­plexed by Hunch. I haven’t used it for any decisions yet, but I’ll try to see if it’s rel­ev­ant to me at all. Only time will tell.

What social media/​Web 2.0 tools do you use?