The Stackpile

If you are like me, you have accounts with multiple social networks and can barely keep up with the contacts and communications with everyone on them. I find that managing my accounts can even become frustrating – and the few people I communicate with frequently, I used to email and call, so how is this helpful?

Although in the professional networks, such as LinkedIn, I do like to be linked to colleagues that I may have not worked with in the past month, and it does provide for the opportunity to find other contacts with some of these individuals when I am looking for specific information. But, I don’t tend to use even LinkedIn on a regular basis – honestly, I tend to only go on there when someone wants to join my contacts or I need to find a particular resource.

So how are social networks truly useful? Well, if LinkedIn was smart, they would start following the StumbleUpon approach to get the users to find their way into the LinkedIn network on a daily basis. If you are not familiar with StumbleUpon, check it out, it is a social network that is also a search engine of sorts, where registered users that have the same interests as you rate websites, which then are presented to you based on what subject that you are searching for. This network feature provides a unique toolbar that integrates into your browser window provides quick access to the subjects that you are interested in. However, there are downsides to the functionality – searching doesn’t provide the best results, often non-related websites, so sticking to your categories to find interesting related content seems to be the only useful part of this network search feature. But – interesting and provides a unique approach to social networking, which keeps me going back. This may not be for everyone though.

Posted by Christina on June 25th, 2008
Filed under Miscellaneous, Search Engine Marketing, Web | No Comments »