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Social Technologies are applications and services that focus on creating online communities of users. They include the following types of technologies:
Social Networking
Purpose: Allows users to make/keep contacts with other users anywhere in the world. These services generally offer users a personal profile, the ability to add and create new contacts (social, professional or marketing), share status updates, links and pictures and chat online. Often there is an overall focus to the site that determines why and how one might use the site.
Popular Social Networking Sites:
Facebook (generally social)
MySpace (generally social, though largely in decline)
Twitter (social, but characterized by limited profiles and succint 140-character status messages)
LinkedIn (professional networking)
FourSquare (social and focused on location)
Blogging, or "web logging," is a form of online journaling. Blogging has been popular for over a decade--in fact, as of last year, there were over 133 million blogs operating online. Blogs are created on what are called "platforms," that is, a framework on which the application is run. They are characterized by having chronological entries, generally authored by one individual (although multiple individuals may contribute entries to a blog), and giving readers the ability to comment and have conversations beneath the blog entry. Blogs also heavily rely upon the use of tagging structures to organize and search for topics and themes. Recently, "microblogging" services have become more popular, allowing users to quickly and easily post short bits of content without doing much in the way of blog set-up, design or maintenance.
Commonly Used Blogging Platforms:
Wordpress.com (hosted free online) (Wordpress Basics PDF)
Wordpress.org (user-hosted)
Blogger (Introduction to Blogger PDF)
Typepad
Movable Type
Tumblr (microblogging)
Posterous (microblogging)
Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is exactly what it sounds like: these services allow users to bookmark sites and pages that they find interesting or helpful, tag them with keywords and then share those bookmarks with the internet public, as well as see what other users have bookmarks. This provides an interesting way to find new online resources and see what the world is looking at. Often these services have browser plugins and toolbars to help facilitate marking, tagging and searching.
Commonly Used Social Bookmarking Services:
StumbleUpon
Del.icio.us
Digg
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News Aggregator Forums
News aggregators have become increasingly popular the last few years, particularly for people who are interested in gettings news from a variety of resources and conversing with other users about the content. These sites rely on user-driven content. That is, the community is built on users who submit articles and sites from a variety of sources, and site provides a forum in which users can discuss particular pieces of content. There are "mainstream" aggregators, which pull in content on a wide array of topics and sources, and specialized forums which focus on specific arenas, such as technology or a particular political perpective.
Popular New Aggregator Forums:
Reddit
Digg
Fark
Huffington Post
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