Connections

As social media is becoming more mainstream, I find I am discussing various tools and voicing my opinion in many daily situations.

Half-geek that I am, I have explored quite a few tools over the years.

For instance I find myself explaining:

• Why I deleted my Xing and LinkedIn accounts. Why it’s not such a good idea to list all of my customers on Xing. That I didn’t really get any good networking results on Xing and LinkedIn. There’s a lot of showing off and spam. Cos of my Marketing IT profile I was contacted by dozens of IT outsourcing providers.
• Why I am wary of Facebook. It’s a closed garden. I haven’t forgotten the recent TOS uproar regarding content rights.
• Why I still like Flickr. After so many years.
• How Twitter is establishing itself as a news channel. And how I can see scenarios where people blindly re-tweet propanganda and myths.
• Why I believe a consolidation phase is bound to happen ‘cos many tools haven’t really figured out their business models.
• That building communities is hard work. And requires lots of time. It doesn’t happen out of the blue.
• While Scoble and his followers are discussing the real-time web, I find myself trying to explain how I use Google Reader. And that it’s about the flow rather than individual static web pages.
• Why I sincerely believe that everybody on the Internetz needs to develop media skills. The Internet does not forget.