I use Twitter for not very social purposes. I like to follow people and organizations I am interested in. For those that write tweets, I get some insight into what they are doing by reading what they tweet. If I add a given person to those I “follow”, that person or organization is notified. There may be some special setting that prevents notification or delivers lists of new followers in batches but I don’t need it or use it. On the other hand, somebody like the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson with a number of followers nearing two million, just the notification of new followers is a lot of web traffic.
I have only about 100 followers (which is still more than the group I email my blog to).
The other purpose for my Twitter activity is to create a place where highlights from books I am reading or perusing can be stored and found. So, inside a Kindle or Kindle app, I highlight some comment of interest and share it via Twitter. I can see them again on my own Twitter page and also on Amazon’s page at kindle.amazon.com.
I do get exposure to Facebook through my wife, who looks at the program just about every day and shows/tells me what she finds to be the best comments, jokes and photos.
I knew I could name a few other social computing sites, like LinkedIn and Pinterest. But I know I don’t know very much about any social media site so, naturally, I Googled the subject. I got 2 billion 20 million results but I didn’t read them all. I figured there would exist more social web sites than I had heard about and I was right. This article in Wikipedia lists more than 200 and I am confident that some in other countries are not listed. I also looked the subject up in Amazon and just about everything on the first results page related to using social web sites to promote a business, which I am not interested in.
I think most people know about Facebook and many have seen the movie The Social Network, which tells about Mark Zuckerberg and the beginning of the web site that went on to gather over a billion users. Most businesses have some idea of pestering their customers with an e-newsletter, coupons or chatty comments while dreaming of a billion customers.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
