What I’m reading: Stellarnet Rebel by J. L. Hilton and Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher
For many years, I thought it would be so cool to have an online place where you could invite your friends and hang out and relax. Kind of like in Tad William’s Otherland. Now that these places exist (kinda), I find myself struggling with them. Here are some social networking sites and why they did or did not work for me.
Twitter. I like this because it is easy. Very little to set up. Follow a few people and they usually follow you back. It is like a stream of chat going by you, and you can participate as much or as little as you like. Works for me.
Goodreads. In my opinion, Goodreads has emerged as the best library social networking site. It is author friendly and reader friendly. I am fairly active there, in that I check it almost daily. Once a month or so I’ll update my shelves. Drawbacks: I find the groups clunky.
I have token accounts at LibraryThing and Shelfari and one other site, but I rarely visit.
Facebook Pages, Profiles and Groups. For me, Facebook is a mixed bag. I find it too cluttered with options. It is suffering from the same growing pangs that MySpace had until it imploded.
Pages have not worked for me at all. With a page, everything is one-sided. You can’t “friend” anyone; you can only pester people you already know to “Like” your page. They deliberately make it difficult to attract people or to even be visible unless you buy ads. And I am not at all sure it would be worth the money.
After months of neglecting my profile in a fruitless attempt to get the page to work for me, I have decided to use the page for major announcements only and concentrate on my profile. Yes I know, I can only have 5000 friends. I am not anywhere near that threshold. Besides, maybe those first 5000 friends can become my secret cabal of founding fans. Or something like that.
The benefit of a profile is even once I am beyond 5000 friends, I can still have subscribers. But most important, I can create groups of people who aren’t necessarily in my friend list. I am experimenting with groups now, and I think it is the most promising thing I have found about Facebook so far.
Google+. I think this is a fail on the part of Google. It seems to be a great way for people to spam me. I never look at it.
Pinterest. I joined Pinterest because I was hoping to be able to share research sites there, but I have found that it does not work anything like I expected. Apparently it is for photos only. I don’t spend a lot of time surfing photos unless I am doing a Cover Art Sheet, so my Pinterest account is neglected. I may have even deleted it.
I heard that del.ic.ious (or however they break it up) might be more suitable for my research sharing idea, but I still need to look into it.
Blogging. As you probably guessed, blogging has worked best for me. Blogs are clubby but welcoming, and anyone can come by and take a peek without signing up for anything.
You can check out all my social networking links here.
Which is your favorite social networking site? Know of any new ones the rest of us may not have heard of yet?
I’m pretty much with you. Twitter is easy and fun, but it can also be a time-suck, so I am backing away a bit. I use it for about 30% promo (post my blog links, let people know if a new book is out or that I’m giving a class) and about 70% either promo-ing other people’s things, or just plain chatting.
Facebook used to be better, but every change they make seems to make it less user-friendly. I have an author page which I mostly ignore (and the old author page at least allowed you to have your blog posts put up automatically, which they no longer do) and mostly communicate with friends, fans, and follow a few authors I like.
Google+ is a non-event, as far as I can tell. Pinterest looks cool, and I do have an account, but frankly, no time or energy to invest in it. And there may be some legal issues down the line with the posting of other people’s photos…
Twitter seems to be getting less interactive. Maybe most users, like me, now follow hundreds or thousands of people, making it more difficult to engage.
I wondered why my blog posts stopped working on my Facebook page. I am able to use Network Blogs to pull my blog posts into both my page and profile. However, I only use it for my profile. I decided that my page would be an announcement-only site.
I like blogs particularly, too. I am fond of LiveJournal, or LJ, which is a blog host that’s a bit different. They include a “friends’ page,” which is esseantially a LJ-only blog reader. They also include privacy settings that let you share some news only with your LJ-friends, or even with only some of your friends, and still have them turn up on their friends’ pages for convenience. {Smile}
Beyond that, I really like the old Usenet, but that’s going quieter and quieter over time. It worked a lot like bulletin boards. I suspect I’d like those, too, but I haven’t found one I’ve been inspired to follow regularly. {Smile}
Anne Elizabeth Baldwin
Oh man. Usenet boards. Delivered right to your inbox! Google groups is based on the old usenet, I believe.
Yes, bulletin board are very similar. Are you a member of Absolute Write? When I first signed up, I liked it because many of its members were actually successful. The other writing groups didn’t seem to produce many successful writers except Online Writers Workshop.
Long live blogs!
Google groups includes usenet boards, among other stuff. You can access usenet thru Google Groups, but you can also find hosts and email to get it the old, far more convenient way. {SMILE, wink}
Usenet isn’t completely dead yet, but a lot of groups have gone inactive, especially outside of the Big Eight domains. I’ve gotten back to keeping up with alt.books.m-lackey — the group I followed the most in usenet’s heyday. I also peek in to re.arts.sf.written at times. It’s a lot more active, between being more general and being a Big 8 group. {Smile}
Thanks for the tip about Absolute Write. I’ll have to look into that. My problem with getting into web based bulletin boards has been figuring out which ones are worth getting in to. {Smile}
Anne Elizabeth Baldwin