The first Social Media Networks looked like this

I’ve had a bit of an on-again / off-again relationship with what has recently been termed social media. As I might have mentioned previously, I started my online life when I was a teenager by dialing into a local bulletin board system called TopGun. As the board was local, so were the majority of its users. By local I mean the majority of us hung out at the same Denny’s, thus the line between online and off was in constant flux based on where someone was at the time. My understanding of the online world was that it was always an extension of one’s social circle, a meta-layer that sought to augment the real world, to complete instead of compete.

The switch to AOL nearly doomed TopGun. The difference was night and day. TopGun, for all the love bestowed upon it by us the users, was four colors, and could only support two dozen or so simultaneous users. AOL, on the other hand, had email which could reach anyone on the web, IMs to facilitate instant communication, chatrooms that could blow those of TopGun out of the water, and then there was access to the rest of the internet, outside of the walled gardens. I stuck with AOL until I went to West Point, where the firewall would not allow us to connect to AOL’s servers. While at West Point, and through my time in Iraq, the internet became a far less social experience.

After the war, and after getting the internet hooked up in my barracks room, the sense of social began to return. On April 10, 2004, I started my first blog. At first it was merely a place to post my writings online. After all, I had a writing partner and a lit agent in the real world, and plenty of brother’s in arms. What did I need extra relationships online for? Of course, I started plugging more into the Wild West that was the blogosphere of 2004. I started making friends with other bloggers, launched an online magazine, and pushed forward into other, more closed, social networks.

Its So True - Image from XKCD

I tried MySpace. It seemed silly, juvenile, and filled with spammers. My account languished from lack of attention. I tried Orkut back when it was in beta (rimshot, please), but where MySpace focused too much on the look at me individual and the collecting of friends, Orkut suffered from focusing too much on the look at me individuals and the collecting of groups. Both where inherently pretentious in their grasps of the ego. I tried Facebook, and failed to see the appeal aside from a couple of Facebook related hookups. All of these accounts were deleted at one time or another.

Then the social internet managed to get shorter while somehow still growing. While temping at Kellogg’s (yes, the cereal company) I signed up for a Twitter account. At the time I was manually saving all of my zany text messages from the day and posting them to a blogspot blog. Why? Because they were interesting and funny. When taken out of context, that usually increased. Why not skip the middleman and publish directly to the web? I languished on Twitter until the political season kicked into full swing, discovering that I could get news in appropriate lengths and with blazing speed via the service. I was then hooked.

That pretty much brings us up to the current state. If you look over at my networks box, you can see I participate in three – Twitter (a microblogging service), Rejaw (often incorrectly labeled as a Twitter clone, in reality it’s an asynchronous message board), and Facebook (because I was told that I had to, and I plan on using it to market products out).

Oh, and then there was last night’s King of the Hill. This is not a show which I normally watch. However, I had let the DVR queue up the Simpsons to avoid commercials and when that ended the girlfriend and I were unceremoniously dumped into an episode of King of the Hill, and an argument about blogging. The internet, in particular the social internet, is a point of contention in my relationship. I place an emphasis on what my social cohorts, particularly on Twitter and Rejaw, say. When something happens, I will frequently dash out a quick twitter about it on my BlackBerry, much to KnownGirlfriend’s chagrin.

The episode, embedded below, placed Hank Hill in camp with KnownGirlfriend, and my opinion seemingly to match that of the female accounted who creates a MySpace page for Strickland. As one would expect, there was a juxtaposition of resistance by those who didn’t understand the new technology and those who approached that lack of understanding with zeal usually reserved for religion. Yes, neither the girlfriend nor myself go to quite these extremes, but we have both known to view the other in that way.

This, of course, got me to thinking about what exactly social media is. How it’s not new at all. And each form of social media has its uses, its pitfalls, and its stereotypes. For instance, King of the Hill chose to lump together to disparate terms – blogging and MySpace – in an attempt to simplify the social web into a 22 minute cartoon. Those of us who’ve been around know that MySpace has the worst blogging platform in the history of the net. MySpace stopped being relevant years ago largely due to pages like this.

So, before I launch into my own taken on various social media platforms. What say you? Favorites? Strong dislikes? Notoriously or gloriously overlooked?