Overview

Let’s explore the wonderful world of social networks! This is not just your grandchild’s pastime anymore. After we define social networks, among the things we’ll discuss are:

≈                Profiles

≈                Relationships

≈                Connections

≈                Types of Sites

≈                Groups

≈                Creating Your Own Social Network

≈                Safety

≈                How Wayne Hicks Has Grown the BDPA Groupsite

≈                Consolidation for Time Management

Definition and History

Social networks are web-based services that allow individuals to:

≈                construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system

≈                display a list of other users with whom they share a connection

≈                view and navigate their list of connections and those made by others within the system

Memberships are free but some social networks have premium features and/or content that is available with a paid membership upgrade.

Friendster is credited as being the very first social networking site. It was created in 2002 to allow adults 18 and over to connect with friends, family, school, social groups, activities and interests. Shortly afterwards in 2003,  MySpace came along. FaceBook targeted college students when it was created in 2004 but has since opened up to everyone.

Profiles

Your profile is your face to the world. You must create a profile in order to join a social network. The minimum requirements to create your profile are a user or screen name, a password and a valid email address. Once you’ve signed up you’ll usually be prompted to create a bio that includes your age, geographical location, interests, photo, and contact information. Most of this information is optional and it’s a good idea to exercise care with what you share, especially when you’re new to the process.

Fortunately, on most social networking sites you are able to control who sees your personal profile information. Unfortunately, however, most people simply leave the default settings intact and the defaults are usually the settings that allow the maximum amount of access to the information on your profile. Profile visibility options vary from site to site but some of the choices include:

≈                Visible within network

≈                Visible to friends only

≈                Visible to everyone

≈                Visible to search engines

After you’ve adjusted your preferences, take a look at your public profile. What others see will differ from what you see. Looking at your own public profile ensures that others see only what you want to disclose.

Relationships

There are two main types of relationships. Bi-directional confirmation is required for friends and contacts on sites like FaceBook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. This means that both parties must agree to the connection. One-directional ties are called fans, and followers. Certain FaceBook users, especially celebrities, have accounts that allow anyone to become their fan. This helps protect them from stalkers. Twitter users merely follow each other and very few people require a potential follower to obtain permission.

Connections

Unlike traditional offline networks, with online networks each of your social connections (friends) by default is visible to all of your other connections. Because of this, it is much easier to revive latent ties and obtain new introductions. Periodically, I scroll through the connections of those to whom I am connected. If I see someone I know with whom I’d like to connect or reconnect, I send them a request. I’ve also made connections with people I wanted to get to know the same way.

MySpace and LinkedIn are geared more toward protecting your privacy from people who aren’t 1^st degree (direct) connections. This is important because connections can’t always be trusted. We’ll discuss that in the Safety section of this document.

There are quite a few interactions available once you’ve made a connection. You may view profiles and status updates, leave comments or send messages. A private message will only be seen by the sender and the recipient(s) while a message blast goes to everyone but might appear to have only been sent to one individual. Other ways to share include posting links and uploading photos, music and videos.

Types of Sites

There are probably as many different types of sites as there are interests of people. For our purposes, we will focus on three broad categories - niche communities, professional and passion-centric - and Twitter.

MySpace and FaceBook began as niche communities but have since evolved to become more inclusive. Niche communities are places where members share common interests but might not be as passionate or as focused on any one specific interest as people in the passion-centric social network communities.

Professional sites like LinkedIn, Visible Path, Groupsite.com, Brightfuse  and Xing are designed to support career oriented networking. There are very few “fun” related activities and little tolerance for requesting connections to people that you do not know personally. You’ll find job postings and answers to questions related to topics designed to help promote professional knowledge and activities. Members on these types of sites are usually able to upgrade to a paid membership and receive access to “premium” features and content.

Passion-centric sites like Dogster, Care2, and MyChurch are communities for people who are passionate about a common interest. The key word here is passionate. They are excellent places to find community related resources and information. Most of them have forums that provide members with a place to engage in discussions about their passion.

Media sharing sites such as Flickr, YouTube and last.fm allow people to share photos, videos, and in the case of last.fm, music preferences. On sites like Flicker and YouTube you upload content from your personal computer or data-enabled cell phone. They act as a server and host your content so that you can link to it or upload it to other places on the web.

Last.fm allows members to upload music (audio and video) and even create their own radio station. Music is rated on the site based on user input. As members choose music to listen to, suggestions for other songs and artists they might like are made based on the principles of the Music Genome Project. Pandora is an Internet radio website that was created specifically to implement this project. Some of these Internet based radio stations have applications that can be downloaded so they can be used on certain Internet enabled cell phones.

Twitter is a unique combination of blogging and social networking. It is very simplistic, allowing only updates of 140 characters or less at one time. Members “follow” other members and are able to know “what they are doing” based on updates.

Yammer is a microblogging service launched in September 2008.^[1] Like Twitter, it allows users to post updates of their activities, follow others' updates, tag content, and create memes. Unlike Twitter, Yammer focuses on businesses, and only individuals with the same email domain can join a given network.

Groups

Most social networking sites have groups that help its members meet colleagues and enthusiasts from around the world. Group members are able to learn about upcoming events, as well as view photos, images, and links of other group members. The group administrator(s) sets rights and permissions for group members that usually include the ability to upload your own photos and videos to share with the group and participate with other group members in the discussion area at various levels.

Creating Your Own Social Network

Although most existing networks will allow you to create your own group, if you want to take it to the next level you might consider creating your very own social network. The platform provider is much less visible and you are able to brand the network with your own identity. Ning, KickApps and CrowdVine are sites that allow users to create and customize their own networks based on templates.

Safety

Protect your “personal” information. As previously stated, you are required to provide a username, password and email address to set up a social networking account. Beyond that most other information is optional. Unless your only “friends” are people you actually know, there are some profile settings you might want to omit. The only information that is validated on most sites is your email address. Because of this, there’s no real way to determine if your 15 year old male friend isn’t really a 51 year old female.

Use caution when posting photos and updates. Predators are extremely patient and will often enlarge photos to scour images in the background. These images quite frequently provide clues to geographical locations. When enough of these clues coupled with tidbits of information from updates and other text-based posts are combined, it becomes amazingly simple to find people.

Exercise caution if you decide to meet Face to Face (FTF) with an online contact. Here are some basic guidelines:

≈                Meet only in a well populated, public place

≈                Share the details of the meeting with several people

≈                If at all possible, take someone you know along

Follow this procedure consistently for several meetings until you feel completely comfortable. I would even recommend that you have someone you know remotely observe your meetings the first couple of times after your new friend thinks you’ve become comfortable with the relationship.

All social networking sites have a provision for reporting suspicious activity. Please, do not hesitate to use it. The next potential victim might not be as well-informed and astute as you. Remember to report any and all suspicious activity.

I recommend this article for more information on how to Help Protect Your Privacy in Online Communities.

How Wayne Hicks Has Grown the BDPA on Groupsite.com

We were fortunate to be the first BDPA-related group on Groupsite.com. So, we had a number of months of building it when nobody was looking or caring. In addition, I created all of those BDPA-related YahooGroups (back when they were eGroups) in 1999-2000 era. The email addresses collected from those sites were invited to join BDPA Groupsite.com group. Also, we have worked hard to create content on BDPA on Groupsite.com ... such as the centralized calendar of events ... that give people a reason to come there. Finally, you will find that many of the links I provide on my BDPA Foundation blog point back to a profile or event on CX.

Our growth has been slower in recent months ... while I've seen your BGG CX site have explosive growth. You are doing good things for social networking of BDPA. ~~ Wayne Hicks, 2009

Consolidation for Time Management

It can be tremendously time consuming and frustrating to keep all of your profiles up to date, especially when you’re posting essentially the same thing to each. Fortunately, some other folks experienced the same frustration and decided to do something about it. They created Ping.fm, a free service that allows its members to update multiple profiles simultaneously. Once you log in, you may set some defaults then update based on your default settings or choose the profile(s) and type of update for each instance. A mobile updating service is also available for many devices.

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop Twitter application. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. According to TwitStat, it is the most popular Twitter desktop application.

twhirl is a desktop client for the popular microblogging service Twitter. It allows you to post short 140-character updates about what you are doing, as well as following your twitter friends and read all their updates, replies anyone sends to you, and direct messages to your account. You can also answer to another user by replying or sending him/her a private direct message.

HootSuite won Best App at the Shorty Awards, Manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success. HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter® toolbox. With HootSuite, as you create a tweet, you are provided with the option to shorten your URL and have it appended at the end of your tweet. The shortened URLs appear as ow.ly/xxx. Once you’ve published tweets with the shortened URLs, you can track the clickthroughs from within the tool by clicking on the “Stats” tab. The Stats show Clicks by Region (broken out by country), Top Referrers (by click), Most Popular Tweets and a click graph. All data can be filtered by date range as well, which is really helpful when preparing client reports.