Social Media Overview

Social
Networking – "A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals, ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds"

Are social networks the future of search? I think so. The history of the web has been a history of trying to organise its increasingly vast information; Yahoo! started as a directory aiming to categorise every website before moving to a more portal structure now. Categorising has never been truly successful, spam and the sheer volume of websites soon overwhelmed, so it was that search engines became more useful for finding useful information.

The Google algorithm relies mainly on the power of links, a human element to factor in how popular a website is. This is still very much subject to gaming, companies able to buy themselves to the top of search engines without the content to truly warrant their position; like every automated process there are ways to game the system. And still, no where near complete web information; Larry Page has stated that Google probably only index's around 5% of the current webpages out there.

The growth of such social networks brings the power of human discretion to searches. Already, you will get much more interesting information on say "laptops" if you search within a network site ( "laptops site:digg.com") than within Google itself, Google results reflecting more the commercial sites efforts to grab your attention. Fine if you're looking to buy, not so fine if you're looking for background information.

StumbleUpon this month announced it would be moving to have more features in search accentuating its already existing enhancements to Google searches. As more and more people sign up to these services, as the trend seems to be going, the power of user voting becomes more and more powerful. The new Wikisearch upcoming promises much in this regard, one to watch. The cream of the web starts to raise to the top; this can be only a good thing in my mind.

So essentially social networks are here to stay - here are a few of the most popular ones categorised to make it easier for the novice to determine if they're any cop or not.

Networking

• Facebook – fastest growing,
  widgets.
• MySpace – Largest userbase
• LinkedIn – business related

Social Bookmarks

• Del.ico.us
• Mr. Wong

Social News Sites

• Digg
• Newsvine – More editorial
  control but well presented articles that can be linked to from other sites
• Propeller (formally Netscape) –
  Like Digg but with some editorial suggestions
• Reddit – Like Digg but a bit more sophisticated

StumbleUpon

• Channel surf the internet

Make-your-own-webpage

• Squidoo
• Hubpages

Forums/Blogs

• Hundreds of forums in every
  genre
• Technorati – Blog searcher – if
  you have a blog submit to Technorati to appear in searches, gain respect
  etc

Resources

Good analysis of some social network sites

Useful page with lots of social network sites in one place

Wiki list of socialNetworking sites (not exhaustive)

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