A Concise Guide to Social Media

or, the role of social media in today’s internet

Facebook – Useful way to keep in touch with (or keep tabs on) people you can’t really be arsed keeping in touch with (or stalking) for real.

Twitter – fun way to communicate with friends and receive news in a nicely abridged fashion, without all the other cruft.

StatusNet – an open source version of twitter, without all the users (follow them on Twitter)

Buzz – it’s integrated with GMail

LinkedIn – add your boss to your network, and get linked to all his pals, many of who are bosses of their own companies in the same industry – neato!

Email – useful way to keep in touch with Dave

Orkut – it’s kind of like Facebook, except Brazillians use it for hooking up

Microsoft LIVE profile – is to Facebook what Windows 98SE is to OS X Snow Lepoard

LiveJournel – like a private diary, except shared with the world

Flickr – cool photo sharing site with (slightly) less of a focus on pets, and (slightly) more of a focus on photography as an artform.  At least, it is if you want it to be…

World of Warcraft – get a satisfying feeling – one so desperately lacking in the rest of your life – of achieving something

Blogs – useful place for rants, and posting shit you may like to recall

Blogger – as with blogs, but banned in China

craigslist – like the personals section in a newspaper, but without the cryptic acronyms

del.icio.us – Ctrl+D on steroids

MySpace – some website with lots of static background images and underage kids

Wikipedia – you can change George W. Bush’s portrait to that of a monkey

Second Life – provides a valuable virtual space for people to get naked and have sex with strangers, stage protests with flying dildos

YouTube – upload Downfall parodies here, take them down here