How many times do you run into an old friend and after a brief conversation part with the old saying, "Don't be a stranger!", "Keep in touch!", etc.? I suppose that is akin to the old, "I will be praying for you" that I involuntarily blurt out when someone shares a concern with me, but that is definitely another subject for another day. Wow, only one sentence to get off-track - back to the subject of keeping in touch. With all the social networking sites these days, I find it fairly easy to keep an eye out on what friends, old colleagues and family are doing. The challenge, as with all fairly new Internet technologies, is that one must utilize several sites/services in order to keep an eye on all those people you want to.
From what I can tell (perspective = 40-something, techie, married with kids), MySpace and Facebook (and to a lesser extent - MyFamily.com, friendster.com, classmates.com, etc.) are all fantastic ways of keeping up with life events, travels, general ups and downs of many people in one's circle. Experientially, I find that some of the bands I enjoy (including my brother) can be found on MySpace, and that I can keep up with personal contacts, and my daughter and her friends on Facebook. Since when did Facebook overtake MySpace with the young people anyway? "Young people"...since when did I get to the age where 20-somethings and younger are referred to as, "young people?" Yeesh.
For more professional networking and communication, I like to use LinkedIn and Plaxo. I have found these sites to be invaluable in providing introductions to new companies, and for keeping track of colleagues and customers as their careers meander off in new and exciting directions.
While I enjoy the social aspects of Facebook and the networking capabilities of LinkedIn, I don't really consider them indispensable. Now the real-time methods of communication available today, I consider absolutely vital in my daily world. I can use IM (I use Trillian to access AOL, Yahoo and MSN contacts) to ask my wife if I need to stop on the way home from work for anything, my boss if he has a few minutes to chat about a new prospect, and friends about their latest escapades - all without having to compose and send an email (yes, I am a member of the email haters club). Recently, I have found Twitter to be an interesting way to let everyone know what I am up to, it doesn't require them to be interrupted with my message, and as a positive side affect, updates my status on Facebook. So now you understand my (and everyone else's for that matter) plight - which services/sites do I use so as to touch the most people out there that I care about? Please comment and let me know what you use!
When you count up the above and add the various email aliases, there are now in excess of 10 mediums (media?) for me to track in order to keep up! In the end, I guess this is a long winded way to say that with today's technology, one can keep up with a lot of people very easily! It just requires you to track several partially integrated and some completely stand-alone tools to get the job done right. As more and more media developers find ways of integrating with each other, keeping track of them will continue to get easier. Perhaps my buddy Brandon, the Architect, can propose and manage the development of the "killer app"!?!?
Keep in touch? Definitely! Just find ID "jggenius" pretty much anywhere and connect!
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2 comments:
Hi Jim! My very non-current response, just for the record, is that I really like your Twitter / status updates on Facebook and feel like Facebook overall is a great way to maintain a sense of connection to the far-flung... it's a funny little window into people's lives. -Molly
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