Beyond Facebook and Twitter
Yes, there's more
Posted by Melissa Wiley
in Reviews
on Friday, March 12, 2010 10:00 AM
As I’ve shared this week, Facebook and Twitter are the two social networks I use most often. Today I’d like to take a look at some other forms of social media I find useful and fun—and some I don’t use at all.
1) Social media for book lovers
GoodReads is a site that helps you keep track of the books you read. Enter a book title, and you can mark it “read” (past tense), “currently reading,” or even “to be read.” You can see read reviews on the book and enter a review of your own, if you wish. I’ve been using GoodReads pretty steadily for the past two years to log my own reading, and now my husband and teenage daughter have their own accounts. As with Facebook, you can create a network of GoodReads friends for swapping book reviews and suggestions.
There’s even a GoodReads app for Facebook, if you’d like to display your recently read titles on your Facebook page.
LibraryThing is another great site for book lovers: the idea here is to catalog all the books you own! You can even use an inexpensive scanning device called a CueCat to scan in the ISBN numbers of books in your personal library. As with GoodReads, you can add category tags to help organize your collection.
Those are just two of the many social networks for book lovers! But what about the reading you do online? What’s the best way to bookmark and share posts and articles you want to remember?
2) Social bookmarking
Delicious is one of the oldest social bookmarking sites, and one of the best. Its layout is clean and simple, allowing you to look up your saved articles by tags of your choosing. Add a Delicious button to your browser’s toolbar, and you can easily bookmark a web page with a single click.
One thing I use Delicious for is to flag reviews of books I’d like to read—I mark them with the tag “TBR,” which stands for “to be read.”
Tumblr is another form of social bookmarking—it uses a blog-like format to capture the links, quotes, and images you want to save, sort of like a big scrapbook. While I use Delicious for links I want to share on my blog (and for my TBR list), my Tumblr account is a catch-all just for me. After a frustrating lapse a while back when I couldn’t remember where I read an article I very much wanted to refer to again, I decided I needed a journal for my online reading. I keep my book log so faithfully, but what about the zillions of posts and articles I read on the web? Enter Tumblr. In the olden days, it would be called my commonplace book.
3) Shall we play a game?
I keep coming across articles that talk about how puzzles and games can help keep your memory sharp. (Here’s one at Prevention Magazine.) But I must confess that’s not why I play Scrabble online — I do it because it’s great fun. My favorite way to play is the Lexulous app at Facebook — you can challenge any of your Facebook friends to a game — but the newish Words With Friends app for the iPod is growing on me. With both apps, you and your opponent take turns, whenever you have a spare moment. Games can last hours or even weeks. No time pressure! For me this is massively important and is a big reason why I’m able to play.
4) Photo sharing and more
I like Flickr for sharing and storing photos, but I know some folks swear by Picasa.
But gosh. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Tumblr, GoodReads, Library Thing, Flickr…that’s quite a jumble of social media to keep straight! Some people use FriendFeed to pull it all together. You can set up a FriendFeed account to collect all the entries you make on other social networks — every tweet, status update, shared item, book, and photo — pooling all that activity in one place. It’s a sensible idea, a good way to streamline, but I don’t use it myself. If any of you do, feel free to chime in the comments and let us know what you like about it.
I have to admit I feel a little self-conscious listing all the social networks I do use — a long list like this could easily give the (false) impression that all I do is play around online. The truth is, what I like about social networks is how they help me use my computer time wisely, help me limit it. My Tumblr account keeps me organized (and is faster than pasting clippings into a scrapbook or writing out quotes in a commonplace book). My Facebook account keeps me connected with family and friends. (I’m a terrible letter writer!) My Goodreads account is a source of great joy — I only wish I had started keeping a reading log at age 14 the way my daughter is! My Library Thing account, well, that one sits mostly ignored. I have faced the fact that we have too many books and I will probably never get them all catalogued.
The main thing is that social media are here for us to use as best suits our needs. They don’t have to take over our lives. Used judiciously, social networks can help organize the time we spend online, so that we can use that time efficiently and satisfyingly, as one small slice of a rich and real life.
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