Social media is a fast-moving phenomenon. There's a lot to know and get up to speed on, and more happening all the time. Sometimes it helps to pause for a few moments and take a look around. Check out some of the trees that compose the forest.
Here is a random overview of some of those trees. Some have already grown into mighty redwoods, others are mere saplings. This list is definitely not comprehensive, but maybe you'll find a few items of interest here or tap into a jumping-off point for further exploration. And as your own explorations uncover sites or applications that you find particularly useful, please let me know.
Although I have accounts on sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and NewsGator, I have not analyzed or delved into many of the other sites on this list deeply enough to endorse or dismiss them. Some may be useful; others may be virtual time wasters.
But that's the nature of social media: As the number of sites and applications continues to grow at Internet speed, some social media tools will demonstrate significant value for businesses while others will not. Be that as it may, knowledge is power and hopefully this list will contribute to our collective knowledge:
Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. Upon registration, users can access their account from any computer or mobile device.
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious strives to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.
Digg is a site for people to share content and collectively determine its value. As submissions receive increasing numbers of "Diggs," they are promoted for other visitors to see.
Digsby is a free software product that helps you manage all your IM, email, and social network accounts from one application.
EveryZing provides search technology and brings the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) to online audio and video content. By aggregating structured and unstructured digital content for faster, easier discovery, EveryZing adds value to search and drives user consumption of multimedia content.
Facebook is a social networking site. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its organization tools, which allow photos to be tagged and browsed. As of November 2008, it claims to host more than 3 billion images.
Friendfeed is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.
Goodreads is a free website for book lovers, conceived as a large library that you can wander through and see everyone's bookshelves, their reviews, and their ratings. You can also post your own reviews and catalog what you have read, are currently reading, and plan to read in the future. You can also join a discussion group, start a book club or contact an author.
LinkedIn is a social networking site. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments. You can then form connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections' connections, and the people they know, linking you to a vast number of other professionals.
MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends. Create a community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends
NewsGator seeks to help individuals and businesses improve the way they find information and communicate internally and externally through a wide range of RSS aggregation products and social media tools.
Pageflakes is a customizable portal to the Internet based on '"Flakes" – small, movable versions of all of your web favorites that you can arrange on your personal homepage.
Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as plurks) through short messages or links, which can be up to 140 text characters in length. Plurk is a communication medium meant to form a balance between blogs and social networks, and between email messaging and instant messaging.
Qik is a web application that enables users to share video from their mobile phones and post video live on any website.
Reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. Users vote on links that you like or dislike and help decide what's popular.
Seesmic is a video blogging web application in alpha stage to make video uploading easier for those using webcams. Seesmic has been called the "Twitter of video", however conversations do not take place in real time. The service has 20,000 users to date and 70,000 viewers per month.
SlideShare is a community for sharing presentations. Individuals and organizations upload presentations to share their ideas, connect with others, and generate leads for their businesses. Anyone can find presentations on topics that interest them. They can tag, download, or embed presentations into their own blogs and websites.
StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that " like-minded stumblers" have recommended. This helps you discover certain content you might not find using a search engine.
Technorati collects, organizes, and distributes the global online conversation. Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation.
TweetDeck is a free beta application that aims to improve the functionality of Twitter by taking large numbers of twitter feeds and organizing them into topic-specific columns, thereby consolidating tweets into more manageable pieces.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (AKA tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.
Viddler is a web application that allows you to upload, enhance, and share digital video inside your web browser. Viddler supports tags as a way of identifying content and finding a specific video (even among your own) when you don't know or remember the title.
Vimeo is a video-centric social network site that supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content.
Yahoo Buzz can be about anything - a great story on a major news site, an extraordinary bit from an obscure site, an intriguing video, or a fantastic blog that shouldn't be missed. Instead of editors, anyone can help determine the top-rated stories. With Buzz, Yahoo determines the most popular topics that people are searching for on Yahoo. Then they showcase the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting and emailing stories to friends. Stories with most "Buzz" are then published on the Yahoo! home page.
Yahoo Pipes is a Yahoo composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Simple commands can be combined together to create output, such as combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating it.
Comments? Insights? Welcome to the conversation!
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