When involved in any community or social networks, the amount of friends and followers gets to be a game for some people. I on the other hand prefer to keep my number smaller so I can actually develop some relationships. There are currently five “community” spaces that I am active in but in each I have a different goal /purpose.
The biggie of the groups is no doubt Facebook. Everyone is joining it! Friends everywhere to be found! I have been a member of Facebook since April 2007. At the time, I only found one or two people that I knew. As Facebooks popularity grew, so did my friends list but at a much slower pace. I decided early on that I just wanted to have friends from my past that I wanted to get back in touch with and current friends that I wanted to update easily on what I am currently doing. The auto features of importing feeds from Twitter, this blog, and other digital spaces is outstanding. And it has been great addition to my life and makes communicating easier. I am not actively searching for people, just one or two here and there. So I was surprised yesterday when I passed the 100 friend mark. Interesting but no where near the amount most of my friends have. But it works for me.
The “hot one” is of course Twitter. I joined Twitter on February 17, 2008 with the goal of seeing if this new technology would add any benefit to my work life concentrating on metaverse personalities. I soon found out that it was great to see what some of the metaverse leaders were thinking. Quickly I passed 100 Followed and 100 Followers by March of 2008. Since then I have slowly added here and there. Currently I am following 233 people and I am followed by 210 people, of which about only 80 of them actually care what I have to say.
Linked In is of course my professional community space and I used it just for professional networking. Instead of “Friends” list, it is a “Contact” list which is appropriate. I should be doing more work on increasing my number of contacts but just have not put the time in. Currently my number is 50 with most of them coming from my days at Plantronics.
The fourth community is revolves around running and beer. Many of you know about Surf City H3, but for those who do not basically we meet once a week and get a bit of exercise in the form of the old English school game of Hares and Hounds. What has been great to see is that this group has a community site using the Ning platform. Started just by one person a little over one year ago, the site called HashSpace has grown to 13,000 members! It is a great way to stay in touch plus meet new hashers.
My fifth space is a private family space using Yahoo Groups. It has been a great way for members of this large family to stay in touch plus lots of work that had been done on family trees and history is now well documented.
Each of these communities are important to me and it amazes me everyday that most of these tools and technology that I now use have just come into play.
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