I’ve been on Twitter for a long time, but I never really knew what to use it for. Until Facebook introduced mobile updates, I used it as an easy way to update my status. But that was unusually constraining on what I could and couldn’t use it for (since all Status updates had to fit the format “Nishant is…”). So I always knew that I wasn’t really using it the way I should/could.

But my experience following the twitterings of some folks, and my meeting a number of avid Twitterers over the weekend at a Techset cocktail party at the Gansevoort, has made me rethink how I am going to leverage Twitter going forward.

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I’ve been long enough in the professional world to know the drill of how to exchange contact information. Usually it’s an exchange of business cards, with the occasional email address or cellphone number written on a napkin thrown in. However, at this event, all I heard was “you can follow me on twitter at…” or “my twitter handle is on my business card”. I felt so web 1.0!
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Anyway, I’ve decided to try and leverage Twitter as my micro-blogging platform. No more having to wait to get to my computer to write a full-fledged blog post (blogging by email feels too clunky). And no more trying to figure out how to think up complete sentences, suitably composed paragraphs, and lucid thoughts. For things that need only a few words and possibly a link, Twitter does the trick better than anything I know. The ability to do it all by text message is pretty convenient too.

So the upshot is, there is going to be one more way to follow my random musings. If you are on Twitter, you can easily follow me by visiting my profile and clicking on “Follow”. If you don’t want to sign up for yet one more social thingamajig, then you can subscribe to an RSS feed of my twitter postings here. I promise to try and keep it interesting (For a sample, check out the “My Lifecast” widget in the right sidebar of this blog for my most recent tweets).

Now if only Twitter manages to stay alive…

Read this really interesting article in the [tag]New York Times[/tag] this morning about a parents foray into the world of [tag]Facebook[/tag]. Until recently, you could only join Facebook if you were in a school and had a school email address. This effectively limited Facebook membership to the “young” crowd. But a few weeks ago Facebook decided to open membership to other people, allowing anyone to join. Then, based on the email address, you can automatically get connected into a community.

So if I joined with my work email ( …@oracle.com), it would automatically put me into a network with other oracle folks. Pretty neat idea, and the features of Facebook definitely seem to be better than [tag]Orkut[/tag]. But seeing how I already am part of a pretty good business-oriented social network ([tag]LinkedIn[/tag]), this really didn’t feel that interesting to me. And I don’t think I will convince everyone on Orkut to jump ship to Facebook. One can only hope that the Orkut folks start upgrading their features.

However, the article did point out another themed social network that sounds interesting. According to the article, [tag]care2[/tag].com is a site for social activists. Sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

[tags]Social Networking, Web 2.0[/tags]

This weekend Tanu and I went to meet up with some family friends of ours who turned us on to this [tag]social networking[/tag] website called [tag]Orkut[/tag]. A site that is in the same vein as [tag]MySpace[/tag], it apparently has a huge following outside the US, including India. Which is the real reason why we were talking about it. Apparently all of T’s cousins (and she has a LOT of them) are on it. So we decided to check it out.

Surprisingly, it turned out that Orkut is related to [tag]Google[/tag], having been the invention of an employee at Google. It doesn’t seem to be promoted on the Google applications page, being still in Beta. Obviously, you will need a Google account to become a member (one more way in which Google is trying to become the premier Identity Provider on the web). After joining, I found it to be pretty basic in nature. After all the complaining I did about MySpace, I found Orkut to be even more basic in the features it offers. The security controls around one’s profile are pretty difficult to understand, and are not flexible at all. You are only allowed to set up the controls on a few specific fields like birthday and email address. The capabilities around setting up interest lists like movies, sports, etc are pretty standard. It is still unclear as to what capabilities are available for skinning your profile page (which if you recall was a very ugly hack in MySpace, but was still possible). The capabilities are not really developed, except for an integration with Google Talk (google’s chat application that I mainly use from within gmail). There also seems to be some rudimentary integration with other Google services, like YouTube and Picasa Web Albums.

Add friends turned out to be an interesting exercise. It took a while to figure out a foolproof way for me and Tanu to connect our accounts. I couldn’t find her by doing a search, and actually had to invite her for Orkut to detect that her email is already in the system, and then I could add her. Adding other friends were not that hard. So maybe this is a case of privacy actually working. It will probably take a few more days of experimenting to figure out if it works. My biggest worry of course is spam, since I really haven’t put any personal information other than my name in.

We’ll see how it goes. But I guess that this proves that the social networking thing is not about features or ease of use, but a herd phenomena. Essentially you go where everyone (you know) goes.

[tags]Web 2.0[/tags]