People discuss social networks, and social networking, endlessly, but what do these terms mean? They only came in to prominence in the past couple of years, but it seems like everyone just thinks you should automatically know what it means, and why it’s so important.
The basic concept is simple: you join a community that is close to your interests, set up a small profile about yourself, and try to locate others who may share your interests. Once you find other people who share your thoughts, you can talk with them, get suggestions how to further your hobby or career, and do some true networking with them.
Originally the networks were sites like Classmates.com which focused on you reconnecting with people you went to school with, but as time progressed they evolved into sites like MySpace.com where you could connect with people you had never met, but shared interests with.
The problem then sprung up of social networking lost its focus. People became obsessed with accumulating as many “friends” as possible, giving no regards to the quality of people they were connecting with. So now the reverse is happening and we are seeing hundreds of social networks pop up, but all with very specific topics that make it easier to sort through the signal to noise ratio of the other members you meet. And, if you have an interest that doesn’t have a social network yet, or you just want to set up one for a specific group like your little league team, there are options known as “white label” sites where you can set up your very own, such as Ning.com.
Overall, social networking is still probably in its “toddler phase”: it can walk, but it’s not very sure of its footing yet. As we have gone from narrow focus to broad focus, and now we’re coming back down to narrow again, it is getting more useful as you can really get at the meat of any given subject.
How do you find them? The link I gave above lists over 350 networks, but if you go to any search engine, enter your interest followed by “social network”, you are bound to come up with some results that will interest you.
Good luck!
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