Quick Guide to Social Networking

Facebook started off as a way to connect students on college campuses and today it has evolved into something much much more. Keeping in touch with family, friends, co-workers and of course fellow students is still the major function but there are also thousands of apps available through the site as well as great media linking capabilities.

In the past couple years Facebook has also weaved itself into the web via the Like button, feed widget, and comment widget. These allow people on Facebook to connect with websites and vice-versa allowing for a much larger conversation on any topic.

This is the largest and most popular network on the planet, so if you're new to this, it's a great place to start.

Twitter is an interesting service in that it's a mainstream micro-blogging service where most people after asking what it is usually ask "What can you do with it?" As it turns out, just about anything. Twitter is used for all manner of communicating and it's no mistake that it bears large resemblance to text messaging as that's where the 140 character limit comes from.

Some people use this to keep up with the world as news tends to break faster on this service than many others. Retweet functionality allows one person to share another person's post instantly and beyond that there are quite a few clients and apps built around the platform.

Whereas Facebook apps are almost always built into the site to capitalize on sharable data, Twitter apps cover gaps in the platform itself. Need to shorten a link? There's a bunch of sites for that. Want to share pictures and videos? Additional services abound. Tired of the 140 limit? There are sites for that too. Twitter is the reason for the recent resurgence of short-linking on the web and that trend will no doubt continue on for quite some time.

Getting into Twitter is easy, finding new ways to use it is fun.

LinkedIn is smaller than the other two major networks, but it's important all the same because it connect business professionals. The interface can connect in the other services and LinkedIn itself can function as a both a social and business networking tool. Given the current state of the economy, it's no wonder the user base has grown substantially over the past few years.

This is a slightly more advanced network than Facebook or Twitter, but if you're comfortable with those, this one should be a piece of cake.

Google+ Recently burst onto the scene as a brand new social network built from the ground-up re-represent social connections as circles and essentially make social networking simple again. It's still technically in beta, but Google has opened the doors to new users and there are always invites available to get in on the action.

The biggest part of G+ is that it's a social network built into Google's own platform. you can use your Google account with any number of services that you may already be using and then seamlessly switch over to G+ as needed. This is a step in the right direction for Google and it looks like they've learned a lot about the failures that were Buzz and Wave. High hopes for this one so far.

» Intro Pic made with social media icons from Komodo Media.
» Introduction header pic via Unusual Historicals.
» Networks header pic via New York Talk Exchange (NYTE).
» Additional social network pics modified from commonly used icons.